William Boling @ the New Museum, NYC
William Boling, an Atlanta-based photographer and supporter of ACP, is part of “Montage: Unmonumental Online”, a group show at the New Museum, in NYC. His project “You Ain’t Wrong“, an exploration of online auction imagery, is viewable online at rhizome.org.
Boling’s exploration is a mash-up of found imagery on the New Zealand auction site TradeMe, vs. the global auction site eBay. Boling’s pairings of images from the two sites create a new narrative that begs one to unpack not just the pairings, but how and why these images originated in the first place. For more, check out the interview of Mr. Boling by Stephen Shore.
From the curator:
“William Boling’s work reflects on the status of found and vernacular photography in the era of Web commerce. The artist has compiled a large archive of product photos placed by their owners on the online auction sites eBay (USA) and TradeMe (New Zealand). On his Website, You Ain’t Wrong (2007), seemingly random juxtapositions of images from the respective sites simulates a dialectical fusion between the two, leaving the viewer to imagine and fill in the meaning created in these mergers. This project evolved from Boling’s earlier eBay-only project, called Peel (2006), but suggests an added layer of ethnographic context. In this sense, the artist manages to bring the now very “traditional” techniques of photography and montage into the realm of digital narratives. “
