Body Double

Body Double – The series “Body Double” is a portrait of Los Angeles – not the actual city in California, but the abstract place which is embedded in the general consciousness through the representation in popular culture, primarily in movies. “Body Double” is a hike through the streets of the metropolis, partly based on appropriated images – from Google Street View, films, or vintage imagery – partly actually photographed on location in Los Angeles. Almost nothing here is what it appears to be at first glance – the sculptures photographed in the streets as well as in hotel rooms were never in the indicated places, the images are partly automatically deconstructed or created by software; the majority of the works were created in several steps that took place outside and inside the studio.

Every picture questions and discusses its conditions of production, the authenticity of what is shown, and the unconscious expectations and experiences that one brings to the table when looking at an image.

“Body Double is a book long portrait of Los Angeles made with appropriated images, constructed images, sculpted images and manifested experiences in conversation with elements, fragments of possible memories coexisting with real deconstructions, and real uncertainties glueing it all together. It takes the viewer on a dazed walk through a city’s self and its double, all filtered by the multitude of versions we might experience of it, or we definitely did experience of it, if only through a possible, unrealistic memory.”

–Elisa Medde