Three projects for the 2006 season of artists’ billboards produced by Clockshop. The participating artists are Trevor Paglen & John Emerson, Ignasi Aballi, and Nadiah Bamadhaj. Funded by the Lef Foundation and CBS Outdoor.
Trevor Paglen is an artist and geographer based in Berkeley, California. His project ‘CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006’ is composed from flight data provided by the Federal Aviation Administration and Eurocontrol. The map is a visualization of the movements of aircraft owned or operated by known CIA front companies. The project illustrates some of the more obscure relationships that have been forged between the United States and other countries over the course of the war on terror. John Emerson is an activist, graphic designer, writer, and programmer based in New York City. He has designed maps for Human Rights Watch, UNDP, Amnesty International, and United for Peace and Justice. John is currently a Partner at Apperceptive, LLC.
Source of Found Image: Malaysian National Archives. Wars in other countries bring communities into sharp political focus. However all the net searching will not bring you closer to finding if the people you met are safe from one bombardment to the next. In the great void of your search is the cyclical rhetoric of politicians, acting as a firewall to events in specific times and places. In this work I use, manipulate, and reinterpret a found image from the 1960s, to highlight an irony that is as applicable now as it was then -- that when a community is brought into political focus, its individuals begin to disappear. Nadiah Bamadhaj was born in West Malaysia in 1968. Since 2000 she has produced drawing, video, and digital images.
Ignasi Aballi is an artist who lives in Barcelona, Spain. Since 1998 he has been assembling lists based on daily cuttings from the newspaper. From these cuttings he organizes different groups creating an extensive series of lists on different themes: persons, dead persons, wounded persons, disappeared, immigrants, money, time, drugs and ideologies. His Project, “Listos(Inmigrantes)” is based on selected cuttings from Spanish newspapers from 2001-2006.
The Clockshop billboard series is located at 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90036.
September 11 – October 8, 2006
CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006, Trevor Paglen & John Emerson
October 9 – November 8, 2006
The Inquiry, Nadiah Bamadhaj
December 9, 2006 – January 8, 2007
Listados(Inmigrantes) 1998-2006, Ignasi Aballi
Test Site / 2005
Test Site, the 2005 season of artist billboard projects, invited 4 artists to respond to a series of photographs titled Destruction of house #1 by atom blast, taken in 1953 in Yucca Flats, Nevada. Funding is provided by Viacom Outdoor, the Puffin Foundation and City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Participating artists: Michael Blum, Allan deSouza, Mary Lum, and Lisa Young.
Public Speaking / 2004
Public Speaking appeared in June, August, October, and December 2004. Four projects were selected to spark curiosity, conversation, and debate about the images and words that were and were not circulating around the 2004 Presidential election. Participating artists: Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, Susan Silton, David Thorne, and Mario Ybarra, Jr.
Clockshop is a non-profit media + art organization based in Los Angeles. Clockshop supports and produces projects by artists, theorists, and activists which are realized in a variety of formats including: media arts, public art, documentary, and text-based publications. Clockshop was founded in 2003 by Julia Meltzer.
