Jonathan Gitelson
Monday, 7 September 2009
Work from The Car Project.
“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 club 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 the car, with car cover, parked in front of the clubs from whom I had received fliers…” – Jonathan Gitelson