NYZ gathers artefacts from New York City and transforms them through the process of dialogue and digital exchange, seeking to manufacture new hybrid myths of the city.
Our collaborative practice was founded on a commitment to develop our shared vision of photography as an unfixed medium. Beginning with curatorial projects in 2012, we have consistently viewed photography as a space of possibility and play.
NYZ takes New York City as a source and repository for the imagination. Although a location we have only visited separately, it remains a site of shared and distinct experience. For us, the city is a generator and container of images, while images become containers and generators of further cities and further images.
We work with various materials – scanned, photographed, and found imagery across digital and analogue formats, together with objects – swapping, merging, editing and re-editing to generate images and surfaces in which are embedded our collaborative processes, our dialogue of re-imagination.
The project brings tactility to digital methods: objects, illustrations and prints are digitally incorporated through devices like the flatbed and hand-held scanner. We want to test the concept of the scanner as a zone in which images can be re-performed according to the movement of beam and hand, conjuring a new metonymy from personal, popular, and found materials, extending the idea of the city beyond mere geography.
Our images evidence the processes of building and re-building, planning and improvisation, fixing and falling apart that occur in the realms of both artistic collaboration and our chosen urban context. Creating unstable imagery from New York City that would be both foreign and recognisable, we hope to invoke the city as inexhaustible aggregator, container, and generator of the unfixed.
Nick Scammell sustains a practice that cuts across photography and literature and frequently involves collaboration. His current collaborations include That Burning Field, a response to the writing of the US poet laureate, Charles Wright, and the curatorial project After. He considers the image an opening rather than an ending, a rumour rather than a document. A liquid instrument and a performance.
More of Nick’s work can be seen here.
Michael Rodgers grew up in Memphis, USA and moved to London, UK in 2000. His practice is focused on the connections people have with the world and how relationships between the immediate and the imaginary establish those connections. His previous work applied hand-carving and watercolour to photographs of urban interactions, while more recent experiments involve copper etching, cyanotype, and found objects in an attempt to tread along the photograph as a fence between the real and the imaginary.
More of Michael’s work can be seen here.
