States (Relié)

Ex-fashion photographer Christopher Griffith had nothing less than a radical reinterpretation of American iconography in mind when he assembled a crew to travel the sideways and byways of a forgotten America to shoot everyday, utilitarian things found dotting our landscape. Searching out abandoned gas stations, remote industrial plants, budget motels, strip mall car lots, utility fields, roadside ditches, and even materiel graveyards, Griffith and his team constructed huge backdrops around each painstakingly selected specimen, creating stark, decontextualized, and utterly magnificent renderings of the myriad things we see and forget without noticing. An airplane engine cowl. An old pickup truck, A massive earth mover, A sterling fire engine. A weathered traffic sign. An oil rig. A satellite dish, A defunct burger barn, A motel sign, basketball hoop, dock crane, bridge pylon, rocket, cement mixer, dump truck, seesaw... "Griffith's American voyage was similar to that taken by Andy Warhol, who rode across the U. S. in the mid-60's squirreled away in the back of a station wagon, Warhol marveled at the Popness of the American landscape-at how once one understood Pop one could never look at the landscape in the same way. And he was right " Douglas Coupland