Jaz Ludwick

Looks Nothing Like George Washington

A series of images based off one-star Google reviews of high-profile tourist destinations. Consisting of five 24'' x 36'' inkjet prints mounted to Aluminum Composite Panel.

“Looks Nothing Like George Washington, is a series of images based on one-star Google reviews of high profile tourist destinations and driven by a fascination with online user behavior and motives. This series employs found imagery acquired through Google Earth and digital photography in a process that oscillates between physical and digital spaces. This process represents the separation or lack thereof in those spaces as a way to personally digest the overwhelming mass of data encountered online. Some reviews encountered are spam while others are earnest. By establishing a passive relationship with each review that regards the absurd, facetious, grumbling, or mundane complaints with deference, the series flattens the perception of truth and fiction and strikes an uneasy balance between observation and critique. Some of these images are based on individual reviews, while others on wider trends related to the specific tourist destination, giving each image a degree of semiotic ambivalence. What has been created in each image with the emphasis of the subjects scale on the landscape places this series in a hyperreality, where the ability to consciously differentiate reality from a simulation of reality is dissolved. Much like the perception of truth and fiction is flattened in this series. The theorist Jean Baudrillard who formulated this concept of hyperreality said, "We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning." This quote relates to the work visually, while also speaks to the process of trying to digest the overwhelming amount of information we encounter on the internet on a daily basis. From The Washington Monument to Machu Picchu, these images were inspired by some of the one-star reviews left on Google’s review forum. ”