Michael Ashkin
20 Nov 2009 - 24 Jan 2010
© Michael Ashkin
Hiding places are many, escape only one, 2007-8
recycled cardboard (work in progress)
Hiding places are many, escape only one, 2007-8
recycled cardboard (work in progress)
MICHAEL ASHKIN
Galerie
Nov 20, 2009 – Jan 24, 2010
In his photographs and video works Michael Ashkin works on a new understanding of landscape that allows him to combine criticism and homage in a dialectic tension. A characteristic of his photographic surveys of desolate transit towns, devastated areas and dismal industrial wastelands is a documentary strategy with which he semantically opens up the depicted topographies and declares them to be places of projection, of rest and reflection. In the past few years, Michael Ashkin has been concentrating his reflection on the conditions in which a place evolves and how it is perceived above all on utopian spaces. In a model that he develops as an ongoing process, Adjnabistan – the name derives from the Arabic/Farsi “adjnabi” for “foreigner”, “stranger” or “other” and describes a land of impossible origin – he explores the logics of physical urban organisation between social ideals and structural necessities.
Michael Ashkin, born in Morristown/New Jersey in 1955, lives and works in New York.
Galerie
Nov 20, 2009 – Jan 24, 2010
In his photographs and video works Michael Ashkin works on a new understanding of landscape that allows him to combine criticism and homage in a dialectic tension. A characteristic of his photographic surveys of desolate transit towns, devastated areas and dismal industrial wastelands is a documentary strategy with which he semantically opens up the depicted topographies and declares them to be places of projection, of rest and reflection. In the past few years, Michael Ashkin has been concentrating his reflection on the conditions in which a place evolves and how it is perceived above all on utopian spaces. In a model that he develops as an ongoing process, Adjnabistan – the name derives from the Arabic/Farsi “adjnabi” for “foreigner”, “stranger” or “other” and describes a land of impossible origin – he explores the logics of physical urban organisation between social ideals and structural necessities.
Michael Ashkin, born in Morristown/New Jersey in 1955, lives and works in New York.