NYAB Event - David Molander “Urban Zoom”

David Molander “Urban Zoom”

Storefront for Art and Architecture

This event has ended.

Urban Zoom is a solo exhibition by contemporary artist and photographer David Molander. The exhibition presents a series of hyperrealist works that go beyond the surreal and expressionistic to depict contemporary urban and social landscapes, including events related to the Occupy Wall Street Movement in September 2011 through a site-specific photographic installation on the Acconci/Holl façade.

The works depict various urban landscapes in New York and Stockholm: an accident on the Lower East Side, the loneliness of the Gowanus Canal, the psychedelic view of a nightclub in Stockholm. By manipulating the images through enlargement, cropping, dissection and zooming, Molander guides the visitor through a metropolitan journey, offering new perspectives of the urban environment.

David Molander’s façade installation premiered as part of Storefront’s exhibition, POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions .

The contemporary urban imaginary is constructed through a vast layer of information and mediums of representation. Urban portraits that synthetically depict this growing perception of reality are experimenting with new techniques to construct the contemporary image of the city. Urban Zoom presents a selection of hyperrealist and experimental photo and video works by David Molander that go beyond medium specificity to depict contemporary urban and social landscapes. Passing by the surreal and expressionistic, the works in Urban Zoom create an immediate urban portraiture viscerally and intellectually experimental, yet simultaneously real.

The work of David Molander merges the journalistic, taxonomic and the dreamlike. Through hypermediation - the connection and manipulation of multiple images-, his work constructs urban conversations and landscapes through numerous layers and scales of understanding, each acting as a testimony to the different forces at play in society. From urban infrastructures, to social gathering spaces, to textural details of construction materials, his portraits offer sectional cuts through each space and situation depicted to register sameness, repetition and difference in the construction of an image that is simultaneously real and hyperreal.

Resolution and scale are fundamental aspects of Molander’s work both technically and conceptually. His photographs reveal—and in some cases, obscure—new details at every glimpse, unveiling the complex spatial and temporal layers that the city carries.

The works presented in the exhibition range from photographs of large-scale urban territories to images of small urban details manipulated through enlarging, cropping, dissecting and zooming techniques to present various scales in the city. From a sectional representation of Stockholm’s subway, to corner conditions presenting anecdotal situations around a Lower East Side Fire Hydrant, to social movement scenarios like Zuccotti Park, all images in the exhibition guide the viewer through a familiar yet abstract metropolitan journey.

The installation, a spatialization of the methodology underlying Molander’s project, presents the work through a multiplicity of these scales, mediums and formats allowing the visitor to experience through the works and the space itself different “Urban Zooms”. Thus, the size and formats of the works on display range from the use of large one-to-one scale images to the intimacy of the interactive digital pieces, fostering the multiple reflections and juxtapositions that the images present. A site-specific photographic work, a large scale image of the events related to the Occupy Wall Street Movement in September 2011, covers the interior façade of the gallery in its entirety. Through the special configuration of the façade panels, the piece creates a dialogue with the same New York City that witnessed the events, while questioning what has happened to its urban landscape since the protests began.

Through the different temporalities and conflicts inscribed in the contemporary city, Molander’s Urban Zoom makes the viewer reflect on the juxtaposed social and political forces constructing urban life. The viewer looks to a work that is simultaneously looking back. In one of them, even Molander himself is looking at us from inside a police car.