strawdogs

Ballard was the great chronicler of the real and present dystopia – the American suburb.  The photographer Michelle Lord pays homage with her haunting images.  They show ‘ancient’ appliances stacked like blocks to make monuments and totems – pyramid, obelisk – against a backdrop of midcentury brutal prefab concrete facades.  The concrete looks plastic.  And in each an onlooker and his dog standing at the margins of the sickly aura of a highway light.

From Michelle Lord’s show Future Ruins  on Ballardian.

Familiar architectural locations around the city take on the appearance of evacuated spaces occupied by strange, carefully arranged structures, built from the technological detritus of abandoned television sets, cars, computers and domestic appliances.