Greg Girard: Pacific Strangelove
Greg Girard Negishi Housing Area (US Navy) #1, Yokohama, Japan 2009 Courtesy of Clark & Faria Toronto
Nothing quite summarized the Bush years in the White House so much as the release, in the spring of 2002, of the Pentagon’s Unified Command Plan, which neatly divided the planet into six military regions, each with its own US command acronym: USNORTHCOM, USSOUTHCOM, USCENTCOM and so on. The level of presumption of this plan was stunning, and its implicit assumption of US global control was chilling. In Greg Girard’s new show “Half the Surface of the World,” the China-based photographer presents a series of images from more than 20 US military bases and communities within the realm of USPACOM, the Asia-Pacific component of the plan that literally comprises half the surface of the earth. In Girard’s images we see a combination of aging Cold War aircraft and residential gated communities. The impression his images leave is of an absurdist, yet serious, notion that nuclear warfare is perhaps just a tool for the protection of banal suburban bungalows and the lifestyles they support. It is a series of images that makes the power-brokering of the US seem itself a relic. (55 Mill St, Toronto ON)
Greg Girard US Mail Box, Negishi Housing Area (US Navy), Yokohama, Japan 2008 Courtesy of Clark & Faria Toronto
Greg Girard China Airlines Office, San Francisco 1982 Courtesy of Clark & Faria Toronto
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