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Chris Thompson
28 Jun - 12 Jul 2019
Garages are funny things, they make interesting site for exhibitionism.Â
And as it happens, so do doggos.Â
One is a site of storage. A space for the physical archiving of memory, activity. The favourite trope setting of the sitcom writer looking to set up a heartfelt conversation about the past in a typically hack fashion. it is the dumping ground, where things go to become junk, loose value and become relics, signposts and artefacts of both a person’s life, as well as a culture. To enter such a space is nothing less than an act of excavation, implicitly voyeuristic. A good space then, to fictionalise.Â
The dog on the other hand is fundamentally a site of projection. Its domestication is our first act of biological appropriation as a species. Moulding its body like plastic for hunting, now we shape it through visual culture, stamped onto in order to convey stock emotions, responses and moods in a system of constant output, recycling, mimesis- the ‘Doggo’.Â
The funny thing about a repetitious element circulating in culture is the power it ends up gaining. The humble sitcom demonstrates the power of trope quite nicely, in fact. We all know Seinfeld. By borrowing 90’s sitcom adverts as a skeleton to graft our Doggos onto, can we help them take a walkies back towards agency?Â
Can the work inherit a ‘knowing’ quality, authenticity and authority where by curiously, man’s best friend becomes the means to unpick the role of appropriation, a cypher?Â
Not so loyal after all.
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Photography by Reinis Lismanis
Brockley Gardens