Luis Andrés Serrano

guildford town centre (assorted specimens) (2023)

Pinned against the wall with nails, this piece consists of 8 specimens that consist of two printed acetate sheets that are soldered together with either a piece of fabric or paper inside. The piece inside the acetate sandwich makes me think of translucent shrimp where you can see their insides. The acetates have various things printed onto them including: a Yelp review page of the mall, facebook comments about hating the renovation, images of my experiments using a scanner with acetate sheets, and edited photos from the little documentation I could find of the mall. The pieces are slightly warped and reflect light a lot. They also are slightly away from the wall, allowing them to slightly wobble whenever someone moves by it too quickly.

This piece is a part of my research into my local mall for my residency at James Black Gallery. It was exhibited during Please Hold- alongside my cohort's work. I specifically focused on the portion of the mall that was demolished in 2013 during the mall's renovation. I was interested in the ideas of fabricated memories and media preservation, especially when it is compared to our present day saturation of vlogs and tagging systems and media advertising public locations. The portion of the mall that I was interested in seemed to have 0 video preservation aside from one Youtube video that wasn't even directly taken in that location, instead using that portion as a background for only 3 seconds. As for photos, there is practically 0 of them aside from a few photos of the outside. Do demolished buildings get an afterlife?