Your Lips Are No Man's Land But Mine
by Jenny Vogel
Your Lips Are No Man’s Land But Mine (2006) is a
series of photographs and videos taken from existing web-cameras on the
Internet.
Imagine, if you will, a person staring into a field of faintly glowing information.
You are looking directly at this person, as they stare slightly below you,
gazing just away from you, at something utterly different. She looks blank
and engrossed in something important; he looks melancholy at an excessive
amount of narrow-bandwidth content. Perhaps this person is looking at a
landscape or reading a page like this.
Jenny Vogel has constructed a body of work focused on this landscape of
digitally connected communication and communication lost. In a series of
high-resolution photographs of low-resolution encounters, she offers a surprisingly
beautiful close-reading of a contemporary loneliness. These images are accompanied
by a video of the one-second-per-shot progression of a web-cam pointed at
a television that result as a fireworks-display of light signals as if trying
to communicate in some unknown code some unknown message. Together they
present a tableau on the dark beauty of a mediated planet.
Your Lips Are No Man’s Land But Mine (man from chile)
Your Lips Are No Man’s Land But Mine (man with glasses)
Your Lips Are No Man’s Land But Mine (ryan)
Your Lips Are No Man's Land But Mine (naked man)
Your Lips Are No Man’s Land But Mine (pale girl)
Your Lips Are No Man’s Land But Mine (smoker)
Your Lips Are No Man’s Land But Mine (young german)
all images are silver prints, 20x24", courtesy of the artist, 2006