“Noise, exertion and rebellion”: Ari Marcopoulos’ latest exhibition, Machine

Date
24 July 2017

Running from 2 September – 14 October, renowned photographer Ari Marcopoulos will be exhibiting his second solo show at the Frank Elbaz Gallery in Paris. As a photographer close to the street and American hip-hop circles, the exhibition, titled Machine, will present a range of images and videos selected from his broad archive.

“The images were chosen very randomly. They are mostly recent with a few ventures into the past. It is a very intuitive process,” explains Ari. “…this allows me to regroup old and new and to see the patterns within my work. The range of places I’ve been to and the people I have encountered are what guide me — those people include edge dwellers, skaters, rap gods, athletes, kids, trees, graffiti, faces, tangles and cars.”

Inspired by Andy Warhol and his wishful dreaming of becoming a machine, Ari’s latest show inhibits this ideal in the sense that everyone these days has “a camera in their pocket” and “in the Warhol sense they have become machines.” With “empty recorders” continually “trying to capture the elusive and the mundane,” this act of human nature and the accessibility of photography has widely influenced his upcoming presentation.

“The trouble is that time slips away and fades away,” says Ari. With this in mind, he aims to slow down the photography process whilst encompassing the fast-paced means of modern technology. “I am considering the filmic quality of still photographs, making fast photocopies and slower colour pigment prints, with the intention of papering the walls with thousands of images.”

“Noise, exertion, rebellion and chaos” are the pillars to Ari’s work. Among his still imagery and other various instalments, there will also be an “ambitious machine” which encapsulates the entire ethos of the event. “For the first time I’m building an ambitious machine of my own: an eight-channel video contraption to show a randomised array of my rarely seen short films,” says Ari. “The collection of works in view represents a broad range of images of the past and the present. The Machine adds the element of time and the cacophony of place to portraiture.”

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Ari Marcopoulos: Machine

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Ari Marcopoulos: Machine

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Ari Marcopoulos: Machine

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Ari Marcopoulos: Machine

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Ari Marcopoulos: Machine

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Ari Marcopoulos: Machine

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About the Author

Ayla Angelos

Ayla is a London-based freelance writer, editor and consultant specialising in art, photography, design and culture. After joining It’s Nice That in 2017 as editorial assistant, she was interim online editor in 2022/2023 and continues to work with us on a freelance basis. She has written for i-D, Dazed, AnOther, WePresent, Port, Elephant and more, and she is also the managing editor of design magazine Anima. 

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