We had a full house last night for the opening of Please, thanks to everyone who came out to see the excellent work of Garrett Gould and Joshua Mathews in person
Statement & video below - we'll see you next month!
Please Timelapse from Andrew Edman on Vimeo.
Much of how we assess the worth of an image (moving or still) or an object (banal or luxurious) is based on our sense of that thing’s production value. Not its intrinsic qualities, but the extrinsic one of perception.
If the smoke and mirrors are sufficient we are swept up in a distortion of reality.
We can come to feel as if we live someone else’s life, a different time or class, if only for a little while. Whether we get that through a movie or a jacket we can’t really afford doesn’t matter much. Eventually the noise is gone and the production struck, the interest rates stay after the crispness fades. The joke of this mismatch between perception and reality, where our senses run amok after what is impossible is what lingers.
The images and objects of Garrett Gould and Joshua Mathews appear at the margins of this grand, illusory show, like the background scenery of an L.A. noir, or stage props of an absurdist comedy. But when taken in on their own, despite these references pointing to a dramatized narrative they take on a strange, amplified presence, as if they could fill the whole story and screen on their own. They are the ghosts of sensations that didn’t really happen to us after all, someone else’s laughter, someone else’s wanderlust meanderings.
“Please” is either hospitable invitation or desperate imploration - to suspend our disbelief and live in among the artifice for a little while, so when we resurface (for better or worse) what is real comes back with full force, a mass and volume of life that is suddenly so much more than it was before.