Paccarik Orue. BS Ice Cream, I Love Ice Cream, 2010. From the series ‘There is Nothing Beautiful Around Here.’
When mentioning, yesterday, that the Status Update book is now on sale, I listed the press thus far. Hours after I published that post, Michael Shaw published his own — a review of the show at Reading The Pictures. More accurately a review of the edit of images within the projects.
Shaw’s review, titled Silicon Valley in the Mirror pairs some images and makes juxtaposition between others. It’s full of the pep and the frenetic keen-eyed we’ve come to expect of RTP articles.
I think Shaw is being deliberately provocative putting Silicon Valley front and center of the title and piece; he knows Rian Dundon, Catchlight and I wanted to create a show that went beyond the “tech narratives” but Shaw, to be fair, makes good points to say that all aspects of this Bay Area region are (knowlingly or unknowingly) in response or conversation with tech monies, people, culture and economies.
On Talia Herman‘s photographs of her family and his comment that “the symptom on the flip side of the [tech] boom is narcolepsy” I reckon Shaw misinterpreted the images and our curation. If there’s a slowness in the countryside and in the last embers of counter culture, it’s still a chosen sleepier pace; a calm, not a fatigue.
I love, though, what Shaw had to say about Paccarik Orue‘s portrait of a Sikh ice-cream vendor in Richmond:
“So much for virtual reality and commodification. In Orue’s photo, a sense of place (and respectful commerce, too) comes from identity and ritual, faith and ethnicity, as well as all the old flavors of the neighborhood.”
Good stuff.
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