Blossom I - Liquid Assets
Liquid Assets, a set of photos taken in Oozells Square, are part of a larger collection of Blossom photos taken at various locations - housing estates, parks, roadsides - around Birmingham. Though drawn to the surreal layering of air born petals and the transformative powers of nature, it’s often the more sinister hinter layers of the human world that undertow.
This set of photos, taken March 2011, named after both the liquidity crisis that caused the banks to crash 2007/8 and the software tool used for manipulation, emphasize a ‘black mirror’ dystopia. Finance and culture goad each other from opposite sides of the square, while intervening restaurant clientele who ‘talk the talk’ are served by an ‘alienated workforce’. Incapable of making equitable change, this is a world where man trips over his own ascension, infrastructure distorts and the very fabric of nature disintegrates.
Earlier this year George Saunders used Einstein’s, “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.” to illustrate the creative process. Images and writing take on their own synaesthesia, in the same way that a ‘decisive moment’ is captured and enhanced by subsequent processing.
Some work remains idiomatic; i.e. the disturbing overlap between higher levels of the government and big banks, due to privatisation of the state through mechanisms such as the PFI/PPP continue. The house-price bubble may have burst but the deflating mathematics of global derivatives (contracts that take their value from the performance of an underlying asset) are proving hard to adjust.
