Excerpts from OVEREXPOSURE & THE CITY written for this publication by Jeremy Gloster:

The work of Sofia Sinibaldi already finds us spinning in so many conflicting directions, perhaps because it is so fervently associative that it encourages us, in turn, to reach for some comparisons of our own. Never content with just one image, just one suggestion, only one methodology, Sinibaldi aggregates photographs and scans of New York into dense compositions, indelible moments of observational experience wrenched into conversation, augmented by all the mishaps of photographic reproduction, whether they arise from manual tampering or the various mechanical techniques to which she submits them...

Speedburn – an artist’s book, don’t call it a monograph –both compiles and reconfigures roughly a year’s worth of frenetic activity into tangible form, delineating the numerous stages, (and failures) of Sinibaldi’s studio process before the work attains finality. Spotted lanternflies and Hennessy bottlecaps litter these pages, alongside photographic scans of bongs and cheap jewelry, but so do instruments of quantification: speedometers, watch faces, tape measures, thermometers, analog chart recorders. The unexpected combination of urban detritus and decontextualized metric data initially seems disconnected until we realize these forms of measurement also constitute an invasive force infecting the current landscape, much like the foreign lanternflies or the waterlogged fashion advertisements...

This pre-studio method of accumulation may propose something like an “AirPod realism”: a way of working that always starts from a state of dissociation, from sauntering distractedly through the physical world in search of a lost modernity, of a time before “the city square abruptly became the screen,” to slightly misread something Virilio once wrote...

Close