Units
Units
Sam Gomez - Vertical Gallery
May
Sam Gomez's light box uses repeated transparencies of a night-time apartment building to invoke the ubiquity of modern life. This representation of a metropolitan nightmare is an allegory of modernization's reduction of the human individual to a unit within the codes of superstructures that dominate modern life. It deals with the co-existence of seduction and oppression found in modernization. Enchanting like glittering embers from a fire, or sparkling like a starlit sky, the windows simultaneously echo computer information, cursors, pixels and any other system of the technological world.
Like someone accessing such a system of control, the viewer is able to peer into the private spaces of large numbers of individuals. There is no one looking back in confrontation. The voyeurism is on way. Here, the human presence is expressed indirectly in types of lighting, drapes, furniture, etc. Yet if not scrutinized, such timid personal insignia appear lost in the grid-like expansion of similar-looking windows. These small lightspots of hope neither defeat nor are defeated by their bleak framework. They simply co-exist.