The place do jets go once they now not fly? What occurs to delivery containers once they aren’t helpful anymore for cargo? The reply is invisible to most of us, however for Cássio Vasconcellos, deserted trains, planes, and vehicles are removed from forgotten.
For greater than 4 a long time, the São Paolo-based artist has been fascinated by the connection between people and the panorama. Through the years, his work has captured dramatic impressions of sprawling cities across the globe, typically from the air, spurring an ongoing collection referred to as Collectives that condenses particulars of city infrastructure like highways and parking heaps into sprawling, all-over compositions.
Collectives 2, to which these photographs belong, focuses solely on the mesmerizing—and mind-boggling—amount of scrapped automobiles and steel indefinitely parked in nondescript locations. Vasconcellos attracts from tens of 1000’s of aerial pictures he has product of junkyards, scrap heaps, airplane graveyards, and dumps to create outstanding, large-scale composite photographs.
The artist has mapped all the junkyards round São Paolo, plus quite a few extra close to the Brazilian cities of Cubatão, Santos, and Rio de Janeiro. He has additionally documented desert landscapes within the U.S. that function remaining resting locations for business airliners and navy jets.
“Over,” for instance, considers quite a few related meanings, like “overview,” “all-over,” “overdose,” or “recreation over.” The title references not solely extra however the overflow of visible info in modern society.
“Seeing a picture like that is to clarify that there is no such thing as a ‘throw away,’” Vasconcellos says in a video about “OVER,” which took him a few yr and three months to finish. “This quantity of issues which might be within the work… they’re on the market,” he provides. “I simply put them collectively.”
“These photographs might appear to be post-apocalyptic eventualities, however they might be our future,” the artist says in an announcement. “We nonetheless must be taught that by throwing issues away and taking them out of our sight, we don’t make them
disappear. The truth is, they hold present someplace else, outliving us most
of the time.”
Vasconcellos cuts out particular person delivery containers, vehicles, dumpsters, and piles of detritus in a meticulous and time-consuming digital course of. He by no means repeats a component in a composition, and each bit is scaled and located in order that the shadows align with the directionality of the sunshine. He then provides mud and dust to the surfaces, concurrently emphasizing the patina of time and an eerie sense of timelessness.
Devoid of individuals, Vasconcellos’s photographs however describe the human predilection to provide, devour, and forged apart. “It’s sort of nonsense, as a result of there are some paths, however you don’t actually perceive how an individual or a automotive can get in there—or get out,” Vasconcellos says. “It’s a attainable world, however on the identical time, an absurd one.”
Vasconcellos is represented by Nara Roesler Gallery, and you may discover extra of his work on his web site and Instagram.
