Grand Illusion
Grand Illusion is a photographic series of screenshots from Google Cultural Institute’s “Museum View” of Baroque European palaces—objects of beauty and manifestations of power whose gold encrusted ornamentation points to the colonial activities abroad that made this kind of wealth possible. While the monarchies and empires of the past used beauty as an expression of their authority, technology, in its mediation of the world, often operates without an aesthetic agenda. Throughout this series, the covert power of technology makes itself visible only through accidents such as glitches, a glimpse of the machine in the mirror, the AI blurring the faces of statuary.
Edited by Theresa Ganz and Joshua Chuang. Text by Joshua Chuang
2023
English
100 pages
Softcover, 23.5 x 29.3 cm
ISBN 978-88-6749-607-5
€ 18 / $ 22
Shapeshifting
"An asteroid hovers in deep space (or is a rock transcending its own mundane form?); Photoshop clunkily composites images of wilderness (or were those boulders placed in some anthropogenic design?); Google distills monuments (coded with grandeur, abundance, and oppression) down to pixels; weathered walls meet crashing waves. This is the way that Ganz's work operates: it is of our time and deeply linked to the past. It is ponderous and ominous, satisfyingly beautiful and distressing; it is both cut by her hand and rendered by the digital. It sees the built world encroaching on the unbuilt, and asks: What happens when the unbuilt world pushes back?"
Meghann Rieppenhoff
Photographs: Theresa Ganz
Concept: Theresa Ganz & Leandro Villaro
Publisher: Penumbra Foundation
Edition: 40 copies
Risograph printing
Leporello | Blind Stamped Cover
16 B&W images w/ 2 hand tinted (front side)
1 B&W Semi Regular Tessellation (back side)
1 Silver Gelatin Print
Mohawk Eggshell Superfine White 80# Text
Size (closed): 10 inches x 16 inches
Size (opened): 160 inches x 10inches
Printed in New York City, July, 2019