100 Photographs for Flusser (2020)
Shown outside at “Museum of” in Richmond, Virginia on April 4, 2020 during the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States of America.
Upon reading Vilém Flusser’s “Towards a philosophy of photography” I was stricken by the way Flusser related photography to text. Intertwining the two to an extreme extent. Thus I sought to make text paintings that mimicked the photographic print traditionally created in a photography darkroom.
The paintings were to be hand stretched 8x10” black and white text works copying the standard silver gelatin print. Each set of words was restrained to four lines. One line for each step of the photographic process. Develop, Rinse, Fix, Wash. I decided to make 100 because it seemed absurd and would be what I would consider the minimum amount of images to work from when creating a photographic sequence.
Thus I present “100 Photographs for Flusser”, a body of poem paintings disguising themselves as photographs.
The paintings are displayed in a quarantined backyard. The canvases are in a staggered orientation on the ground. Each canvas is propped up on a no2. pencil with “This Pencil Is An Artwork By Christian Michael Filardo” engraved in green on it. The show ran from dawn to dusk for two days. With a fire lit in the middle of both days.