Little Big Man Gallery is pleased to announce Doug Rickard’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and debut the artist’s latest body of work titled N.A. Rickard’s new photography and video work continues to explore the darker side of urban America and highlights issues of economic disparity, ever-present surveillance and tendencies toward publicity via social media.
The show will also mark the gallery’s grand opening in its new, larger exhibition space.
N.A. follows Rickard’s critically acclaimed A New American Picture, which depicted street scenes that were found using Google Street View to virtually access forgotten and economically devastated locales of America. For N.A., Rickard looked to YouTube as a resource to extract a chorus of American voices, ‘cultural music’ in a way that is detailed and revelatory but often fragmented. Over a three-year period he culled through countless amateur videos found at first by using American city names as keywords, he later shifted into more specific terms, opening up silos of visual data from which to explore the American cultural landscape. As Rickard became immersed in the platform and sparked by the sometimes predatory and often vicious nature of social media, his exploration turned darker. Moving on to keywords such as “Hood Fight”, “Crackheads Gone Wild”, “Passed Out White Girl”, “Gangstalking”, “Sideshow”, “Racial Profiling”, “Illegal Search” or “Police Brutality” yielded tens of thousands of videos that painted a picture of American violence, anger, frustration and rage, targeted at economic isolation that is pervasive.
N.A., the title of the work is short for “National Anthem.” Intentionally abbreviated to also be read as “Not Applicable,” a common statistical check box on government forms in the US, or it could be interpreted simply as “North America.” The ambiguous nature of the title plays off the idea of an implied narrative, which is a consistent theme throughout Rickard’s work.
Exhibiion runs: September 19 – October 31, 2015
1427 E. 4th Street, Unit 2
Los Angeles CA, 90033.
