Concrete Content - Hosier Lane
Tuesday, February 12, 2002 - Sunday, May 19, 2002
A young man is airborne on a skateboard above the cement curl of a graffiti covered rink in Brooklyn, New York City. The man is Bobby Puleo (2001). The twin towers of The World Trade Centre form a backdrop to this scene. The evening sky and smog is fading over the city. There is a disturbing subtext to this image by Mike O’Meally: Ilkarus who in making wings for himself, flies too close to the sun, damaging his wings and falls to his death.
The lurid sky and backdrop is derealized like Richard Prince’s sunset images, selected and re-photographed from magazines and advertisements. This photograph is characterisitic of many of the images in Concrete Content. As subjects of photography, professional and amateur skateboarders express tbe possibilities of the picturesque. The lateral extensions of skateborders on concrete and plywood ramps reveal the capacities of sites and bodies in a kind of parallax which magnifies their variety and singularity.
O’Meally and Creasy document a masculine masquerade in which the skateboard becomes a fetishistic signifier of the metaphysics of youth. Creasy's image of Dion Kovacs bedroom, (Sydney, 2002) contains the anti-heroic privacy or suburban banality by photographing second-degree, image-fragments fixed to a domestic wall.
The skateboard has a particular relationship to the production of space. The culture is perceived to challenge authorized public space by altering it into a semi–private and clandestine state. The imigges of O’Meally and Creasy articulate the sculptural and architectural capacities of skateboarding in a travesty of minimalist aesthetics. This is apparent in Creasy's site–specific photograph of a group of dismantled, plywood ramps in a pine forest (Mammoth, California, 1999).
These objects retain a reserve of aesthetic and utility potential. O’Meally’s image of Reese Forbes on a ten meter high concrete public sculpture (Sao Plaulo, Brazil, 2001) articulates the subversive production of meaning, desire and use in everyday tactics.
O’Meally uses lighting to photograph Hufnagel in a public car park (Los Angeles, 2001). The immaterial effect of lighting on the industrial interior resembles a white walled, gallery space in a kind of re-image of architectural space.
