Tiltshift race full#
Tiltshift race series#

Tiltshift race full#

Similarly, it is within this comprehensive chain of McCannвЂ™s constituent parts that we are encouraged by visual devices to see its full meaning.ДЄs we propel ourselves forward, the notion of progress is counterbalanced by our knowledge of history. While the detrimental effect of science and technology on the earth is a global concern, these advances seduce society with everyday benefits.

McCannвЂ™s counter-positioning of the mushroom cloud with images of man on the moon conjures the dominance of military technology in our quest to compete and progress. In a lecture in фЂЂ†фЂЂ€фЂЂ‰фЂЂ† he referred to the idea of вЂspaceship earthвЂ™ two decades before фЂЂ‹фЂЂЊфЂЂЌфЂЂЊ transmitted the first images of man landing on the moon. The dome crystallized societyвЂ™s dreams of a life liberated from constraints and tutelage 1.фЂЂЉ Fuller looked at whole systems as points of transformation, not reliant on isolated components. The dome refers to Buckminster FullerвЂ™s utopian project to provide a socio-cultural alternative to the typical rectangular architecture of the time.

Tiltshift race series#

McCannвЂ™s alignment of a geodesic dome, a signature utopian model, with an iconic timber-clad home, an image immediately associated with 1950фЂЂ†фЂЂ€фЂЂ‰фЂЂ‚s America, appears in the series of Untitled drawings. Adopting images from these sources, she reconfigures and subverts them to create a more fluid and undefined mode of reading. McCannвЂ™s practice has consistently drawn from newspapers, websites and books. The juxtaposition of found images takes us from the everyday to the universal. This, when taken as a whole, leads one to begin to understand the complex nature of our visual memory and, through doing so, begin to question how our visual lexicon is encoded with political tensions. McCannвЂ™s layering of these images is indicative of how history impacts on both the present and the future. The historical tipping points of the Manhattan Project вЂ“ the design and development of the atomic bomb вЂ“ of man landing on the moon, and the meeting of Nixon and Khrushchev, are familiar moments captured and stored in our collective psyche. McCannвЂ™s splicing of iconic imagery from the cold war period for Tiltshift calls into question how we construct our current understanding of both the social and the political. This exercise of power as a means of propaganda has implications for the future of a collective memory. Foucault in his publication The Order of Things theorises the connection between power and knowledge, with the dominant culture aiming to foster and maintain overarching narratives that maintain hierarchical structures. What is assigned to our collective memory is often mediated through a framework from a dominant culture, assuming the position of historical narrator. It also creates a unitary fiction of what is valued and preserved.

If collective consciousness relies on the traces of memory, the designation of an image as significant becomes a political act, leading to the preservation of knowledge and the shaping of our cultural memory. The collective memory and its bearing on the construction of visual historical narratives are at the fore of Niamh McCannвЂ™s project Tiltshift.