alejandro cartagena

New Acquisition: MoMA📍

I am thrilled to announce that the @MuseumModernArt has acquired the diptych of the Mother and Daughter from my Invisible Line series. It was acquired through the generosity of Lori Ordover via Kopeikin Gallery. I love to think about how these images and their story will now be preserved into the future and share wall space with works from many artists that have influenced the way I see the world.

Daughter on the USA-Mexico Border Wall, at Friendship Park, California., Mother on the Mexico-USA Border Wall, Friendship Park, Playas de Tijuana, Mexico, 2017.

moma.org/collection/wor…

gm☀️

gm✨☀️✨

📺 @twt_cha_

Why is it important to picture place?

For one of my favorite landscape theorists, J. B. Jackson, to picture America was to understand America. He believed that the landscape was not merely scenery but the physical expression of a society’s values, ambitions, contradictions, and everyday existence. The ordinary spaces of American life, highways, parking lots, suburbs, gas stations, empty fields, and roadside buildings, were as revealing of the national character as its monuments and celebrated natural wonders. To look closely at these places was to recognize that history is not only written in books or preserved in grand architecture, but continuously inscribed upon the land by the people who inhabit and transform it. Picturing America, therefore, was not simply an act of documentation or an aesthetic pursuit; it was a way of understanding how a nation constructs its identity, how its ideals become physical realities, and how those realities often contradict its ideals. For Jackson, the landscape was, above all, “history made visible.” To picture a place was to make visible the often-overlooked forces that shaped it, and in doing so, to understand not just what America looked like, but who Americans were becoming.

This is why I love @GrantYun2's new project. It taps into the legacy of imaging (not only imagining) place, especially the American place. This little on-chain generative code city represents:

Road distance
16.4 mi
13–18 mi

Annual energy
513 GWh/yr
200–700 GWh / yr

Annual water
866 M gal/yr
350–1,200 million gal / yr

Construction hours
30.2 M h
14–40 million h

Embodied carbon
1.3 Mt CO₂e
600,000–1.8 million t CO₂eTop

Operating carbon
150,745 t/yr
60,000–200,000 t CO₂e / yr

Residents
21,561
12,000–40,000 people

Food eaten
9,379 t/yr
6,000–16,000 t / yr

gm☀️

Frank's experiments lead him to the edge of the photographic medium, where the deconstructed image hints at the aesthetics of the new dominant image-creation medium of our time: AI. It is as if photography contained AI even before it was a medium capable of generating images. Thank you, @manznano, for your ideas.