Lily McElroy

This photographer has a really interesting suspended series of images but ti was drawen to this work entitled "Locations".

Her artist statment says that the work began as a documentation of "...public reaction to unexpected behaviour in privately owned public spaces..." These spaces are where we all spend a great deal of our time and they all have a strict regimentation on the expected behavior in theses spaces. There are no public spaces, as myself and Mishca Hill have recently been discussing. There are only points of transit from one private space to the next, or as McElroy puts it, privately owned public space.



She continues to explain that this regimentation has created fear of unconformist actions in these spaces so she wanted to do some thing that was clearly non-conformist but at the same time not confrontational. She also talks about how the work quickly became a study of the alienation in these sorts of spaces and society as a whole. She is putting herself in these spaces in a vulnerable position and wearing only a nightdress and in all her images she was only asked three times if she was ok. She received little empathy. The images explore the passive nature of people that move through these spaces, again something that myself and Mishca Rhys Hill have discovered for ourselves firsthand. People have an incredible ability to block out what they dont want to see...what they fear exists or they dont understand. This series highlights this capacity strikingly.

We live in a culture now that fears the non conformist, it fears those that act without total rationality. Yet the paradox is that a culture of fear and conformity is simply breading irrationality...