Michael Ashkin: Here, in the desert

FOYER-LA’s current project, Here, in the desert, unites photographs, sculptures/models, and writing by Michael Ashkin. The work grew out of Ashkin’s lifelong fascination with the New Jersey Meadowlands. Between 1993 and 2000, Ashkin wandered the area and began thinking of the Meadowlands as a site of “found gardens” where hidden struggles within our landscape revealed themselves. With this in mind, he photographed the Meadowlands and built sculptural landscape models using this source material.

Ashkin’s panoramic Meadowlands photographs were originally commissioned by Okwui Enwezor and made into a 133-image grid installation at the 2002 Documenta 11. Some of these original film negatives have recently been digitized, reconceptualized, and published in book form as There will be two of you (2023) in collaboration with Hans Gremmen of Fw:Books, Amsterdam. The book organizes the photographs to create a sense of a walking journey across the Meadowlands. In the book, an accompanying text by Ashkin written in 2009/2022 (“There will be two of you”) describes an enigmatic incident at the landscape’s symbolic center that promises a redemptive allegory it cannot deliver. This project, in turn, applies the logic of the book to a new wall installation. The New Jersey Meadowlands has long been the core of Michael Ashkin’s visual imagination.