AUGUST 21 - SEPTEMBER 25, 2010
THE GREAT UNREAL
TAIYO ONORATO & NICO KREBS
What happens on a journey through a country whose infinite production in media and art creates and celebrates its own myth? How can you escape from this maelstrom and discover new images behind the plywood facades?
The photo series „The Great Unreal“ by the Swiss artist duo Taiyo Onorato (born 1979 in Zurich) and Nico Krebs (born 1979 in Winterthur), deals precisely with these issues. After the two artists came in 2005 as fellows from the city of Zurich to New York, they have made several trips across the United States. Originated „on the road“ the photographs formulate the real and fictitious, documented and constructed, images and illusions as ideas that meet each other: We see a group of French fries that were assembled as a group of tourists on a cliff at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Street models made of cardboard are positioned in front of the horizon in relation to the camera, so that they look like real, endless highways. A row of old car tires falls down a hill, as would a galloping buffalo herd. In the tradition of Joel Sternfeld or Stephen Shore, Onorato & Krebs play with the images and myths that shape our view of the "American Way of Life". Without resorting to digital manipulation, they build their own unique worlds. And it is not unusual for the trail that leads to the final image to pass over the expansion of the flat pictorial space to the installation space. What remains is the certainty that each row of deserted terraced housing estates, each magnificent landscape panorama, every abandoned motel could ultimately be the perfect illusion – photography as a means to the sober documentation of reality is questioned self-referentially.