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Featuring works by some 45 artists, ORDINARY PICTURES surveys a range of conceptual picture-based practices since the 1960s through the lens of the stock photograph and other forms of industrial image production. Despite its apparent throwaway status, the stock image is the primary commodity of a $1 billion global industry with far-reaching effects in the marketplace and the public sphere.

Focusing on the industry’s distinctive modes of production, distribution, and presentation, Ordinary Pictures foregrounds the work of artists who have done much to probe, mimic, and critique this overlooked aspect of our visual environment. Spanning generations and movements—from early Pop work, avant-garde film, and Pictures Generation appropriation to more recent collage, rephotography, and video work—the exhibition also considers contemporary art’s own function as an ever-expanding global image economy.

Prompted by ideas found within Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," (particularly the perceived value of an artwork related to how much that work is reproduced), Magritte's "La Trahison des images" (highlighting the ambiguity of representation and reality), and stock photography catalogues (that blur the boundaries between artistic production and commerce) the book takes a different approach to the traditional institutional exhibition catalogue through the simple move of excessively repeating images of the same artwork, on the same page. As an intentional design strategy, this attempts to devalue the object-ness of the artwork in the context of a printed publication, and reinforce that what you are looking at are images, and that most of our daily art-viewing experiences comes in the form of reproductions, and not the actual physical artwork.

ORDINARY PICTURES was curated by Eric Crosby for the Walker Art Center.

D A N T E C A R L O S is an independent graphic and book designer. His projects include commissions for cultural institutions, spaces, artists, agencies, and local businesses.

He currently is based in Portland. For more information or inquiries, contact Dante at ddddd@dantecarlos.info

S E L E C T E D C L I E N T S The Aspen Institute, Armory Center for the Arts, Bloomberg View, Carnegie Institute of Art, CB2, Cherry and Martin, Coca-Cola Corporation, Craft and Folk Art Museum, Good Magazine, Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Kurimanzutto, Kohler, Levi’s, Midway Contemporary Art, Motorola, MTV Networks, Museum of Arts and Design, M+, NBC/Telemundo, The New York Times, Sony, The Third Rail, Walker Art Center, UCLA