I like to find art and write poems and read magazines and listen to my iPod and daydream and walk my neighbor's dog - that one's my favorite

Friday, May 23, 2008

The Hmm... Factor: a few photos from Micheal Neff's portfolio

Aurora Village, Shoreline, Washington. 2007

Barrow at Greenwich, New York, New York. 2006

West 11th Street, New York, New York. 2007

What I'm assuming Neff's done here is trace the shadow quickly at a certain time of day, then solidified it with a large piece of chalk and returned to the same spot the next day at exactly the same time. I think it's genius, really, in its simplicity. An art class in elementary school could doe this - but he thought it up, and it looks simply... magical. It's a neat play on the phrase "every cloud has a silver lining," because here they have blue, pink, orange and green linings. To me, it's as though there were some sort of light behind the solid form of the shadow, a light that peeks out from behind and winks at us (in the form of chalk). There's clearly a comment on adulthood and childhood - the child's toy (chalk) is marking the world of the adult (the city streets). Is the light that peeks out from behind the shadows the child in all of us, so to speak? There are no humans in any of the pictures except for those cloaked in cars, so the city landscape is slightly hostile and desolate. I think Neff was trying to make a modern Atlantis with this series, e.g. a magical world where humans can't really exist.

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