Jonathan Gitelson

In his series Dream Job, Gitelson put actual advertisements in a local newspaper under the Job Pages. In his images he combines the ads with the ideal imagined portrait of each supposed character. The Art Director, the Charity Lady, the anti Globaliser are all equally a humorous character cliché instead of the supposed search for the real and the truthful depiction, brought ad absurdum in Gitelson's process. This is naturally different to August Sander's or Irving Penn's search for characterisation in their "type character portraits" from the early and mid 20th Century.

In the narrative storyboard style "posters" as he calls them, Gitelson examines the every day ritual such as the shaking of hands in a particular style, originating in gangs and on the street but today very much part of mainstream youth culture and its various identities catered to, throwing a very different light on this part of our culture.

During the summer of 2004, I moved across the street from the Funky Buddha Lounge, a popular nightclub in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood. Each night I would park my car on the street, and each morning I would find that numerous nightclub fliers had been shoved beneath my windshield wipers and into the cracks of my windows.

By the time I got to my car each morning, many of the other car owners had already left for the day, discarding their fliers on the ground. This form of advertising intrigued me – an attempt at communication with consumers that was clearly failing, creating huge volumes of what was essentially expensively printed instant garbage.

Shortly after I moved in, I began collecting the fliers from my car and from the sidewalk around my home.  By January of 2005, I had collected over 1000 fliers enough to cover my entire car.  I spent three months hand-sewing the fliers together to create a car cover and have photographed my car, with car cover, parked in front of the nightclubs from whom I had received fliers.

“The Car Project” was completed in 2006 and consists of eight large-scale photographs. Each exhibition print is digitally printed at 40” X 50” which allows the viewer to read the individual fliers within each photograph. The photographs have been exhibited along with a metal sculpture that is in the shape of my car upon which I have exhibited the actual car cover.

“The Car Project” received honorable mention in the project competition at Review Santa Fe 2006 (Juried by Yossi Milo, Miriam Romais and Anne Wilkes Tucker) and has appeared in Camera Austria. It has also been featured in an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center.

This project is partially supported by a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.