Michael Corridore’s primary interest over the past six years has been inventing new narratives around automobile culture and its influence on us. After photographing spectators at various races and burnouts contests, Corridore began to explore precise moments brought about by a convergence of figure, landscape and atmosphere. The resulting Angry Black Snake series features barely recognizable spectators cloaked in smoke and dust. We are purposefully given room for misinterpretation, as the true nature of these events is never fully disclosed. You cannot help but be drawn in by Corridore’s “fictional realities” and the work is remarkable for its use of restraint as a strategy to immerse the viewer.
Corridore says “The Angry Black Snake project has led me down a path of searching for fiction captured within real moments.” He calls the images “unreliable documentary”. “They don’t tell the right stories,” he says. “They don’t give up information.”
Angry Black Snake received New York’s Aperture Foundation Portfolio prize in 2009. Aperture’s book publisher and editor of over 65 books on photography Lesley A. Martin says of the project: “Corridore’s Angry Black Snake, is an exercise in minimalism. Each image has been pared down to the barest of elements—urgent gestures and barely traceable figures cloaked in smoke and dust. Yet each image pulses with palpable emotional tension, telegraphed by these barest of representational sketches and the subtle shifting colours of the clouds that descend upon each scene like a flimsy curtain.”
Angry Black Snake – Michael Corridore
August 15th – September 01st
Edmund Pearce
Level 2, Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street (corner Flinders Lane)
Melbourne Victoria 3000 – Australia
Gallery hours: Wed-Sat 11-5
Tel: +61 3 9023 5775
Mobile: +61 408 033 035
Email: [email protected]
