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> Space of making > CARLOS AND JASON SANCHEZ
Carlos
and Jason Sanchez
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Carlos
and Jason Sanchez re-create domestic spaces in minute
detail, being careful to camouflage all traces of their
staging. This concern recalls a cinematic mode of production,
which creates realistic places, situations, and actions.
Like Jeff Wall, the Sanchez brothers use photography to
fix re-created situations, which then refer metonymically
to a narrative of some kind. For their work The Gatherer
(2004), they reproduced in studio the overflowing apartment
of an old man who, his whole life, had amassed innumerable
useless objects—pictures, books, clothes, figurines,
newspapers, and so on—assembled in an order whose
coherence he alone could explain. This man, probably driven
by a compulsion to accumulate, the image seems to tell
us, felt constrained to collect all sorts of things in
the event that they might prove useful someday. By making
us forget the illusionistic methods at work in the production
of this space, the Sanchez brothers skilfully direct our
attention to the psychology of the person they are depicting.
A careful and minute examination of this image, and of
John (2002) and 8 Years Old (2003),
brings out details that heighten its narrative power.
Here is a method similar to literary narrative, in which
detailed descriptions of living spaces are often used
to fix, as in an image, the personalities of the people
living in them.
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Carlos and Jason Sanchez, The Gatherer, 2004, digital
chromogenic print, 152 x 223,5 cm.
8 Years Old, 2003, digital chromogenic print, 60 x
82,5 cm. Courtesy of the artists.
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