Montage: Unmonumental Online
Digital material is never natural. It iseither generated or repurposed, and
always pre-inscribed with meaning. It settles in sediments, turning the Web
into a veritable billboard land: a frenetic free market in which corporations, private citizens, and fictional conglomerates all wave their own signs. It is a landscape rich with fiction, contradictions, and disjuncture. The new quickly becomes obsolete, and the old is continually revived. Internet-based montage, the assemblage of distinct materials into a new whole, is therefore both an inevitable and perpetual accident and an emerging, illuminating art form....
Montage is the final exhibition in Unmonumental: the Object in the
21st Century at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art.
Launch Project 
You Ain't Wrong (2007)
William Boling's work reflects on the status of found and vernacular photography in the era of Web commerce. The artist has compiled a large archive of product photos placed by their owners on the online auction sites eBay (USA) and TradeMe (New Zealand). On his Website, You Ain't Wrong (2007), seemingly random juxtapositions of images from the respective sites simulates a dialectical fusion between the two, leaving the viewer to imagine and fill in the meaning created in these mergers. This project evolved from Boling's earlier eBay-only project, called Peel (2006), but suggests an added layer of ethnographic context. In this sense, the artist manages to bring the now very "traditional" techniques of photography and montage into the realm of digital narratives.
Born 1954, Greenville, MS / Lives and works in Atlanta, GA William Boling studied drawing and painting at Georgia Highland College, Georgia State University and at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Rennes, France. For 25 years he has practiced law while maintaining an active engagement with poetry and visual arts. He is currently a partner in the Atlanta, Georgia based law firm of Powell Goldstein, LLP and serves on the adjunct faculty at the University of Georgia School of Law where he lectures in his area of specialty, health care law and policy. Boling's small press, Fall Line Arts Press has recently published Moving Gone Dancing the critically acclaimed poetry collection of Mildred White Greear. Boling's press also serves as the imprint for some of his own art and photographic work including Photographs from O'Connor Country; Peel; Because They Come That Way and other short run and artist book works. These and other photographic works are included in private and public art, library and special collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Emory University, Bard College, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Window Gallery at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/wboling
GENERAL URL:
williamboling.com
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/wboling
GENERAL URL:
williamboling.com