Image courtesy of Masood Kamandy & Charlie James Gallery
Sometimes when I feel unsure of what to do next, I go and sit on my porch and look at the house of one particular neighbor across the street. I don’t know who he is, but sometimes I see him roll up in his maroon Honda Accord at the end of a long workday, when the sun is approaching the tip of the horizon. He is an elderly Hispanic man; he is usually wearing a dark-blue colored uniform with a white nametag, red letters spelling out his name in cursive. I don’t know his name. I imagine he must be an electrician, or a plumber, or something union and practical, something that gives him a chance to work with his hands. There’s something comforting about his appearance, the fact that he has a routine of some sort, and that when I don’t know what to do, I can sit on the porch and innocently watch his house and hope to see him. I’ve also seen his dog, a small white bichon frise. I’m not sure we’ll ever meet.
When I do this sort of watching, gazing and imagining the feeling of longing to not-know a complete stranger, I feel like Miranda July. In these moments, I never experience any impulse to record, collect, or compose anything; if it’s a feedback loop of the same daily routine, it’s only one that happens in my head, unlike the physical art objects that exhibition such impulses to understand memory and time. Such objects are on view in Record. Collect. Compose.: A series of human decisions, an exhibition organized by LA artist Masood Kamandy, which runs through October 17 at Charlie James Gallery, that asks questions about the acts of making works of art using machines and other technical processes. Using photography as a starting point, Kamandy considers the inherent humanness of the machine and our desire to see and record rather than keeping it on our minds.
Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/907551-exhibit-masood-kamandy-record-collect-compose-series-human-decisions#Qqg1DI10oOdyUs9m.99
