Do something to it, then do something more. Like many “young” photographers today Shahbazi works at estrangement of the mass commons of archetypal/cliche cultural images. Shahabazis format and frames shift both between and within exhibitions, here the “roadtrip,” which having something done, and then something a little more, shift in their continual detachment from the real, until rendered neuter, until we feel them not at all, becoming something so overly familiar as to become foreign, crumbling its content to be mocked by the clownish aggro of intensely hued walls’ overbearing presence, a means vacillating between a self-flagellation for the photos sentimental printed nostalgia and an ironic overlay of cheer, laughter for the slaughter of content. That as the PR mentions these could be anyone’s instagram photos, the new banal spectacular, the dissolution of experience within the grand illusion of the individual for the cloud, a generic humanism.
See too: Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi
