Sean Snyder
Artists Space Exhibitions
What does the classic Warner Brothers cartoon “Road Runner and Coyote” have to do with the urban condition? Sean Snyder’s 1996–98 Urban Planning Documentation (Road Runner & Coyote)—the earliest of the eight works in this modest, twelve-year survey—proffers tentative answers. Beside a monitor playing clips of Wile E. Coyote’s elaborate, doomed-to-fail schemes, Snyder presents two groups of black-and-white photos, all depicting seemingly innocuous elements from the urban landscape. In the first set, each image is accompanied by an ambiguously descriptive sentence: A FAILED LANDSCAPING ATTEMPT ON A MEDIAN, for instance, captions a photo of what appears to be sod and road infrastructure combined in an incongruously informal manner. In the second, ten images are collectively labeled with the single phrase AS A TERRORIST PRECAUTION EVERY PUBLIC TRASH CAN IN THE CITY WAS
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