Movie Map, 2003
6 C-prints and 6 digital prints 127 x 208,3 cm
Courtesy: el artista y The Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco
The Movie Map project contains photo diptychs of San Francisco movie theaters and a nine minute video piece. The six diptychs each pair a photograph of a movie theatre with a digitally composited collage that brings the fictional space of the cinema into the public space of the street. The project uses the term “mapping” figuratively to imply the geographic dispersion of the neighbourhood theatre as a site of the imagination. In the video a fictional mapping of San Francisco is inscribed by two intercut chase scenes: Steve McQueen driving a Ford Mustang in Bullitt and James Stewart following Kim Novak in a 1956 DeSoto from Vertigo. Bullitt and Vertigo contain the two most notorious chase sequences that use San Francisco as backdrop and they were made about ten years apart – Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958 and Bullitt by Peter Yates in 1968.
– CHIP LORD
