MacArthur Park

Daguerreotypes were a radically new medium when they were introduced in the first half of the 19th century. "Draguerreotypes" is a term Carsley uses to describe his series of digital images that are also photographic monoprints. He starts by taking photographs of important international parks. He proceeds to schematize these tonally, and from a vast archive of scanned adhesive laminated faux wood grain motifs, he elaborates a collaged image fragment by fragment. The results are images that look like highly complex pieces of intarsia, but which in reality exist only as digitalized faux copies of nature. —Thatcher Projects

"Draguerreotypes" conform to a type of landscape painting, a mechanical remix of a two-fold representation. Carsley represents parklands by replacing the real tonal color scheme (predominately varying hues of green) with digital copies of wood grain veneers, purchased from hardware stores around the world. The veneers are dropped into the landscapes at a scale of 1:1, allowing the eye to read the wood grains as recognizable domestic surfaces. —Sally Breen