Whitney Stolich
Check your Surroundings
February 18-April 30, 2022
Check Your Surroundings starts with a series of color images with three different size images belonging in a series of 21 images. These were taken with a digital camera of the back- up camera inside different vehicles. There are different ways to engage the car in reverse to shoot with the back-up camera while the hatch of the car is open and in different angles.
There are at least 6 steps involved in the exhibition:
1) A picture is shown on the car screen when the car is in reverse. 2) Artist takes a cellphone picture of that screen 3) The picture is printed on paper. 4) The print, taped on a piece of cardboard, is taken to the location of the back-up picture and a picture is taken of that print against the bigger landscape. 5) The final picture is placed on the back "wall" of the Proxy Gallery. The sixth step is that you are now seeing the Proxy exhibition through another digital screen, a computer or cell phone.
Stolich's project is about sorting one camera image inside another and examining mediated urban space as well as looking at the endless reproducibility of the photograph. She does this in such a way that the pictorial content recedes into the background and we begin to see the picture within a picture within a picture. In other pictures in her series, the photographs depict rural and urban spaces amongst Los Angeles’s vast urban sprawl . There are pictures of pictures of control panels, and pictures of epic sceneries. This is certainly a “place” you should “check your surroundings.” Check your Surroundings takes us to the beach and to the urban curb for fruit in Venice. It goes in the back roads of Topanga and sees the skyline of Monterey. Each image is unique and defines rural and urban space in its own way.