Gazelli Art House is pleased to announce Francesco Jodice‘s second solo exhibition at Podbielski Contemporary, opening this Thursday, the 27th of April. The exhibition will be on display until the 1st of July and presents a selection of Jodice’s series Sunset Boulevard, an observation platform on the last great Western empire.
Here, vicissitudes and postulates of American history, from the gold rush to the recent financial catastrophe, are scrutinised. The 49ers and white-collar workers are the main protagonists of the opening and closing phases of this parable, featuring an endless series of characters who help to tell of its splendours and aberrations, from the cowboys to the Indians, from rock stars to actors, via explorers, gangsters, bodybuilders, intellectuals, artists, presidents and astronauts. The American West, from the Pacific coast to the deserts, is the main stage of this investigation. Francesco Jodice crosses and photographs it, rediscovering the traces of majestic geological antiquity (the Western Plateau was the first tectonic plate to emerge on the planet) and those of recent colonisation (Hollywood, NASA, Westerns, Blade Runner, militarisation, nuclear testing…), the spectre of some of the harshest conditions of the contemporary world.
The works of Francesco Jodice are interspersed with a series of images selected from among his past imagery, indexed as artefacts of an era which has all but come to an end. Archaeology of the present which is already past. And a collection of writings holding the keys to this transition. All this is Sunset Boulevard: a journey to the end of the heroic saga of liberalism, a handbook for the reading and understanding of the American ‘long century’, and a gaze cast forward towards the post-Fordist and post-Western era.
27 April – 1 July 2017
