BigShinyThing

Manchester based artist Hilary Jack has set up a website of images of plastic bags caught in trees. As the project developed, she started to stick her own bags in trees with little signs as well as inviting people to submit photos. She writes on the site:

Two winters ago I noticed an unmarked turquoise carrier bag trapped in a leafless tree in a city centre street, startling and vibrant against an otherwise colourless, urban, winter landscape. The image stuck with me, and I decided to make it into a public work of art.

As well as demonstrating the peculiar madnesses that the net seems to bring out in people, the project is also socially minded. Jack adds, “Urban trees and shrubbery planted at the whim of an architect or urban planner become a magnet for detritus, turquoise bags being the most visible. As a reminder of our consumer culture the bags hang there, taking years to decay, and acting as an absurd memorial to our excesses.”

Maybe she should include that lovely scene from the 1999 film American Beauty, the video footage of a plastic bag blowing in the wind.

Frances Glessner Lee was a wealthy grandmother with a passion for forensic science. She founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed captain in the New Hampshire Police. In the 1940s and 1950s she built dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases in order to train detectives to assess visual evidence. Lee called these tools the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a well-known police saying: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”

The models are still used in forensic training to this day and a book featuring photographs of the 18 dioramas was published last year. The dustsheet reads:

Corinne May Botz’s lush color photographs lure viewers into every crevice of Lee’s models, breathing life into the deadly miniatures, exposing the dark side of the domestic realm, and unveiling tales of prostitution, alcoholism, and adultery.

James Zwakman’s backyards also tell a story but one that is created in the mind of the viewer. His photographs of the models are huge — 220 x 146cm — forcing the viewer to appreciate the intricacy of the models. Zwakman has provided doormats, gravel, and in one case a clothes-drying apparatus with miniature white sheets and t-shirts. This intention is made clear in the title of the show: Fake but Accurate.

Just as Lee’s miniatures train the police to study the minutiae of crime scenes, Zwakman’s photographs bring a magnifying glass to the mundanity of the ‘burbs.