Edition Announcement #218 - James Griffioen

Good afternoon collectors! It's Sara on this sunny day. We're in the midst of moving to a slightly more spacious office which means that the chaos that is JBP HQ is even more crazy. Clattering keyboards and conversations are accompanied by that starchy sound of packing tape stretching over cardboard boxes. Yes, a move (!) even before we open our new show at the JBG, Mixtape, this Friday, November 20th, from 6 to 8 p.m. See you at 6 Spring Street?!

Yesterday we were all abuzz about the easter egg embedded in Jen's newsletter and it seems to have struck a note in all of you as well—the promise of free art for the first five (correct!) responders sent a flurry of emails our way. Easter eggs near Thanksgiving-time? No we have not lost our minds; it's just part of the holiday goodness we're concocting to keep you on your toes as we unveil our master plan for the season of giving. We have all sorts of amazing editions lined up to share with you and we may be dispensing of a surprise or two along the way!

Speaking of surprises long in the works, we first approached today's artist, James Griffioen in early April, a few months after James entered the 2008 Second Edition of Hey, Hot Shot!. In photographing, writing and living, James gives due attention to a city that has been long neglected. Feral House #7 and Feral House #13 document two of many abandoned homes in Detroit. Now a strange sort of media darling, luring the likes of former NYT reporter Charlie LeDuff, the city is still sad, rough, unchanged and mostly un-bettered from all the attention. (James too is no stranger to the spotlight!)

As Thomas Morton notes on Vice, "Journalists love pictures of abandoned stuff." But then what? Writers and photographers go home, readers put their papers down and return to their relatively comfortable lives; heads are turned away again from the disintegrating center of our country.

But if you are James, and you live in Detroit, you can't just look away. James instead looks harder. He looks at what happens not only when we stop seeing but when we leave things alone entirely. While Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is hypothetical, a "thought experiment", about just that—what would happen to cities and infrastructures if humans ceased to exist—Griffieon's photographs are reflections of reality. As people leave in droves, slowly but surely, green growth returns and dominates, covering and suffocating engineered, architectural elements until only the outlines of formerly solid structures are apparent.

While James notes that feral means "belonging to the dead," there is something reassuring about the ability of nature to recover and to reclaim. These old buildings are made beautiful again.

Previous Newsletter : Edition Announcement #217 - Jorge Colombo