Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco 2011
Using Google Street View, filtered through a lens nodding towards Evans, Eggelston, Shore & etc. Doug Rickard's A New American Picture retains much of the 20th century American documentary aesthetic in which he intends to evoke. However, a provocative line is drawn between the fundamental rhetoric of truth which was historically being sought and the reality of what is presented. With a sea of candidly surveyed landscapes available to Rickard, his images of urban outskirts are stitched together with a kind of voyeuristically pointing-finger too tired for a narrative, albeit veraciously unveiling enough to garner a seemingly new way to look at America.
Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco 2011
