Surface Streets Statement
Recovering from a minor traffic accident, artist Meg Madison was inspired to focus on driving - a nearly- unconscious experience that punctuates the day of virtually every Los Angeles resident. By taking a photograph each time she entered her car for roughly two weeks in May, 2001, Madison created a visual diary that captures at once the adventure, romance, boredom, dream-state and drudgery that driving represents for most of us.
Because she chose to work with outdated Polaroid SX-70 film and an older, often temperamental Polaroid camera, the series of 149 images is suffused with lurid, chemical colors and disorienting abstract effects - headlight trails, random light blurs, etc. Experiencing the exhibit is akin to boarding a theme-park ride designed by an artist with a rabidly anti-Disney sensibility. By focusing in on imagery most of us see daily but barely register, (one could call this a collection of "drive-by art”), Madison re-presents our experience, but in an altered state. The artist is interested in image as memory, as narration.
"I like the way pictures can be fragments of memory and driving itself is such an unconscious part of our lives in LA that it takes on a dreamlike quality. So my images are the actual recording of those moments and objects that you encounter as you drive through the city, but seen as isolated images captured in passing, they take on an entirely different, totemic quality."