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Backyard
Artist
Thomas Demand
(Born 1964, Germany)
Date2014
MediumC-Print/Diasec
DimensionsOverall: 90 9/16 × 150 3/8 in. (230 × 382 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of the Director's Council and Museum purchase, 2016
Object number2016.10
Status
On viewCopyright© Thomas Demand / Artistis' Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Category
Label TextAt first glance, Thomas Demand’s Backyard, 2014, a large-scale photograph measuring more than twelve feet across, appears to show exactly what its title purports. A narrow, urban yard is strewn with the clutter of everyday life: a house plant on a crate atop a step stool, a blue tarp crumpled by the fence, a coaxial cable loosely affixed to the vinyl siding outside the window. Beyond the fence, pink cherry blossoms burst in full bloom. Nothing in the image explicitly tells the viewer that the setting is the backyard of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers accused of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. Moreover, closer examination reveals that the image is not a photograph of the place at all but a photograph of a facsimile of that place made entirely of paper.
Demand’s photographs merge truthful documentation and unsettling artifice. Since 1993, his method has involved building intricate, life-size, three-dimensional models in cardboard and colored construction paper in his studio, re-creating settings from found photographs. He then photographs his ephemeral structure and destroys it once the image is made.
Demand appropriates most of his source photographs from the media. He gravitates especially to those associated with culturally or politically momentous events—images that become lodged in the collective consciousness. Backyard derives from a widely published image taken of Tsarnaev’s wife as she exited the couple’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, home in the days after the bombing. In his paper replica of the yard, Demand omitted the protagonist, dislodging the setting from its topical significance. Like views of vacant stage sets, Demand’s photographs are familiar and strange, triggering memories that the mind cannot quite place.
Demand’s photographs merge truthful documentation and unsettling artifice. Since 1993, his method has involved building intricate, life-size, three-dimensional models in cardboard and colored construction paper in his studio, re-creating settings from found photographs. He then photographs his ephemeral structure and destroys it once the image is made.
Demand appropriates most of his source photographs from the media. He gravitates especially to those associated with culturally or politically momentous events—images that become lodged in the collective consciousness. Backyard derives from a widely published image taken of Tsarnaev’s wife as she exited the couple’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, home in the days after the bombing. In his paper replica of the yard, Demand omitted the protagonist, dislodging the setting from its topical significance. Like views of vacant stage sets, Demand’s photographs are familiar and strange, triggering memories that the mind cannot quite place.