Sin título (Utopia) # 9, colour photography, 50 x 70 cm.
Cabello/Carceller. Sin título (Utopia) # 9, colour photography, 50 x 70 cm., 1998.
Description:
“In a series of photographs inspired by a visit to California in 1996-7, Cabello/Carceller document the empty promises of utopia. Like the work on joined bodies, that both imagines and constructs a model of masculinity as shared and partial, the images of vacant swimming pools in Cabello/Carceller’s works signify the gulf between what we imagine and what is. The empty pools, full of longing and melancholy, ask the viewer to meditate on the form and function of the swimming pool. The swimming pool is a place of meditation, an environment within which the body becomes weightless and hovers on the surface of a submerged world. Like a tiled Atlantis, the exposed pool, filled now with air rather than water, reveals what lies beneath the sparkling surface of chlorine- enhanced blue.” Extract from Judith Halberstam’s “Swimming to Utopia,” published in “Cabello/Carceller. Under Construction,” exhibition catalogue, Culture/Education Department, Murcia, 2004. The series "Sin título (Utopía)," offers a counterview to the happy, colorful images of Hockneys’ California. The swimming pools portrayed here are closer to post-AIDS 90’s and show themselves in an apparent wrong time or moment, yet proving to remain beautiful and intriguing. Cabello/Carceller have worked in different series to address the gendered politics of space and have interrogated it to evidence this biased construction.
Medium:
Photography
Tags:
masculinity, Spain, architecture, space, gender
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