Artist and photographer Mark Luthringer’s online version of his ‘Ridgemont Typologies’ – set to open in exhibit form at the end of May in San Francisco – is an intriguing, if conflicted, attack on mass American consumption. Though I can’t say his exact methods, Mr. Luthringer tried to create a visual ‘vocabulary’ of various suburban comforts – from exercise equipment to car taillights to mall roof lines – displayed in a giant repetitious grid of information.

The resulting pieces can be quite striking and poignant, achieving the artist’s goal of “examining the excess, redundancy, and meaningless freedom of our current age of consumption.” To this end, the work is at its strongest – both visually and symbolically – when it looks at consumer goods; the sheer variety of cell phone models or RVs a testament to over-the-top living.

Yet, his pieces on architecture lack the power of his other images, not because they are artistically dissimilar, but because his subjects are already so alike. Pictures of McMashion doorways – seemingly taken in one development – only shows a small detail from a landscape that is already repetitive on a truly frightening scale. Compared to an aerial photo of the same development – the endless rows of homes, the blank expanses of pavement – picking on doorways or mall roofs is like complaining about the Titanic’s paint job.

Link to Ridgemont Typologies

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See Also: Edward Burtynsky + Worldchanging,Portraits of American Mass Consumption,Hippy Shopper,

This entry was posted by Jeffrey Goodman on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Design, Social Change, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.