Tim Portlock
Tim Portlock combines special effects software and the visual conventions of nineteenth-century American painting to creatively simulate real-world American cityscapes. In St. Louis, Portlock endeavors to engage currents of memory in relation to large-scale public housing projects, reexamining a time when the government was thought to have a lead role to play in solving social problems. Sparked by his father’s time living in Cabrini-Green on Chicago's North Side, this series is an opportunity to reflect on the divergence between the still-present possibilities and persistent dismissal of public housing as a social good while ultimately memorializing the experience of people who have lived there.
For Counterpublic 2023, Portlock specifically addresses the notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in North St. Louis through oral histories from former residents. Across a series of interviews, participants describe their apartments and surroundings in detail according to their own contours. Without reference to the overly circulated images of the Minoru Yamasaki-designed buildings, Portlock then builds detailed renderings based on their accounts, creating a subjective, faulty, but more intimate view of how Pruitt-Igoe lives on in firsthand memory and, ultimately, how these memories do not, nor will ever, coalesce into a unified narrative.
About the artist
Digital artist Tim Portlock creates post-apocalyptic urban landscapes. He has mastered a variety of digital platforms and employs them to make art that depicts worlds in which industrial culture has come and gone, leaving certain classes and communities blighted in its wake. Portlock lives and works in St. Louis and Philadelphia and is an Associate Professor at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University. A recipient of a Pew Fellowship, Portlock has exhibited work at Georgetown University in D.C., the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis' Great Rivers Biennial, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Tate Modern, and more.
ARTISTS LINKS
Instagram: @timportlock
Website: timportlock.net
