elsewherestock.com | Jane Claire Remick

Residency
Written By

Jane Claire Remick, Washington D.C.

elsewherestock.com, 2015, interactive new media, digital photographs 

Jane Claire Remick’s web based project elsewherestock.com is a parody of stock photography websites that challenges the generic qualities of the photography they feature and their supposed political neutrality. For it, Remick created a website that mirrors the design and content of iStock by restaging a set of images from that site with photographs of dolls from Elsewhere’s collection, alongside the keywords generated by the original photographer. Viewers can contribute to the site by adding their own tags in the comments field. During the public launch event for elsewhere-stock, Remick hosted an edit-a-thon to encourage visitors to alter and delete the keywords associated with the images in order to intervene in their cultural framing. Remick says she hopes for the project “to elicit critique from the viewer around the visual and textual language used in the supposedly post-racial climate of the 21st Century, as well as the representations used in the less recent past.  

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Jane Claire Remick
Jane Claire Remick

Using sincere parody, I bring individual meaning to tired tropes and ask audiences to question authenticity in order to generate new ways of seeing, hearing, and experiencing personal, social, and historical events. Creating parallel planes is achieved through unapologetic appropriation of signifiers such as institutional voice and stock images, sociological and archival inquiry, pedagogical techniques such as socio-dramatic play, and temporal juxtaposition. Recent performances at venues including: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Hillyer Art Space, The Back Alley Theater, and other DIY venues in D.C., as well as The Leslie – Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in Manhattan, Panoply in Brooklyn, and The Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

Jane Claire created elsewherestock.com during her residency.

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