Jeremy Drummond

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Since 2005, the majority of Drummond's works have been conceived as components of a larger body of work entitled Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. This ongoing project incorporates various media (painted works, sound, video, and photography) to reveal issues surrounding landscape development, cultural diversity, and mediated experience within contemporary suburban environments. Of particular interest are the relationships between perception/representation and reality/imagination within this often generalized, seemingly homogenous context.

Installation Images: Guy L'heureux
Centre des Arts Actuels Skol, Montreal, QC

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Jeremy Drummond: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Essay by Cindy Stockton-Moore

It is tempting to read Jeremy Drummond’s recent work as a straightforward critique of the suburban way of life. After all, suburbia is an easy target -- the cookie cutter houses, the false sense of security, the failed promise of domestic bliss. How simple it would be to look at his candy-colored icons as wayward road-posts en-route to a doomed North American dream! Scholars, artists, and urban planners have been bemoaning the woes of exurban growth for the past fifty years; it’s a comfortable stance, an accepted view. But in Everybody Knows this is Nowhere Jeremy Drummond takes a closer look -- close enough to find difference in sameness, diversity amid the conformity. His investigation into the love-hate relationship we have with our environments moves beyond physical geography to question shared ideas of identity and community.

Street Signs

Chances are the name of the street you grew up on or the road where your best friend lived is as easy to remember as that of your first love. These seemingly random words serve as markers down the proverbial memory lane. In the translation between location and context, the monikers of the sites may gain personal importance but lose semiotic and historical impact. The text of our environment becomes so encoded in our existence that the words themselves become difficult to see.

In the Street Sign Series, Jeremy Drummond forces us to look again at that seemingly ubiquitous text. Divorced from the personal connotations and physical surroundings, the absurdity of the street names becomes apparent. Photographs taken from actual intersections create playful puns in this carefully orchestrated grouping. Viewers ponder the strange chimera formed at the crossing of Canada Goose and Dolphin Song or the implied promise of Fidelity Avenue and Honeymoon Drive.

Equally important is the relationship between the romanticism of the open road and the implied domesticity of these pieces. It is telling that the pastel hues are culled entirely from the Martha Stewart Collection. Their names (Scented Notepaper, Cat’s Whiskers, Violet Powder) evoke Stewart’s particular brand of saccharine nostalgia. A Cake Batter painted home on the corner of HoneyBee and Sugarcane? It’s enough to make you ill, but these ideals – which are often in direct contrast to the way we live our lives – are at the core of many consumer transactions we make on a daily basis. In its simplicity, Jeremy Drummond’s work asks a complex question; whose sweet dreams are these anyway? In a sense, the naming process is most aptly summarized by his documentation of the intersection of Culture and Whitewash.

On a bureaucratic level, the determination of street-names (or odonymns) is a fairly straightforward process. Today, most new odonymns are proposed by the controlling powers of a particular subdivision, namely the developers. The names they choose often reflect the clientele they hope to attract. Monikers that are meant to denote class, like traditional English nomenclature, are used to provide a tone of decorum – to add a sense of history to a community with no relative past. In the same spirit of irony, urban planners note developers’ inclination to name a street after the natural environment they destroyed, as in the case of Fletcher’s Meadow. This is not a new phenomenon, in fact Walter Benjamin brings up similar instances in his article The Streets of Paris in which he speaks of “long vanished” landmarks that still “haunt” neighborhoods where they may or may not have existed. This brings up the idea of location as a generalized text and site for discourse, a reoccurring theme in Drummond’s work.

A more tangible form of semiotics, each sign possesses an enticing materiality. The photographs, printed as die-cut automobile decals, are mounted on custom-painted steel-- the metallic gleam and slick finish of the auto-body paint has the allure of a newly waxed car. The promise of prosperity and happiness reflects in the shiny surface of these ironic billboards for the American Way. By visually referencing the automobile, the Street Sign Series reminds the viewer of the symbiotic relationship between the suburbs and the advent of driving culture. The North American obsession with speed and broad expanses has direct influence on the propagation of sprawl. The correlation led to what urban historian, Lewis Mumford, called “an encapsulated life” based on “the absurd belief that space and rapid locomotion are the chief ingredients of a good life.”

Drive By

This encapsulated life, in which man vacillates between vehicle and home, is indeed what many new housing developments are built to accomplish. With their circuitous routes, prominent driveways, and omnipresent cul-de-sacs, the suburbs are dependent on driving culture. Not only do we witness this visually, the majority of our collective experience in the planned environments takes place within a car. In this way, speed not only dictates the aesthetics of the suburbs, it also defines the way that we view them. The Drive By portion of the exhibition is a series of seventy-four video stills that investigate the complexities of this rapid perception.

Taken from a moving vehicle, Drummond’s images blur the line between rural and ‘developed’ communities. They are apt metaphors for the quickly changing visage of the North American landscape. But the raking shots also imply the speed in which society moves through environments and the cursory modes of “seeing” often employed while doing so. The landscape between Point A and Point B becomes increasingly compressed until all that remains is a ghostly, indistinguishable impression of what has flashed before the passenger.

The collapse of distance caused by rapid transportation is not solely a contemporary concern. The “annihilation of space by time,” as Karl Marx put it, has been discussed since the advent of the railroad in the nineteenth century; it is analyzed at length in Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s 1977 article “The Railway Journey.” In this article Schivelbusch addresses the visual impact of travel: simply stated, increased speed leads to more visual stimuli to absorb at a quicker pace. This inundation of images not only causes stressful viewing, it also leads to a more cursory experience of the landscape – closer to a reproduction of that environment than the reality of it. Viewed through that frame, Drive By presents a thrice-mediated view -- each video-still existing as a documented experience… of a simulated view… of a manufactured reality. Although they are still-images, they function as a loop, reflections of reflections in a Borgesian house of mirrors.

Through his use of video stills, Jeremy Drummond is visually referencing an equally pervasive component of suburban life– the television. By equating the windshield of the car with the screen of the television, the artist parallels the rapidly moving images we absorb. He is also calling to question our role in those images. The driver of a car has some agency – surely it is their choice which route they will ultimately take. But as the landscape between places becomes more and more similar, what does that choice really entail?

Intersections

The changing landscape is documented in the photographic series, Intersections. In these images, we see an environment in flux. Desolate construction sites and man-made environments depict the paradoxical phases of development: the subjugation of natural habitat and the reinsertion of a more perfected version of nature. Here we witness the replacement of the landscape for ‘landscaping.’

In Fletcher’s Meadow, nearly identical homes box-in a man-made lake. The violated land still shows the scars of bulldozers and can barely support the fledging trees, tethered to the ground to remain upright. The ovoid lake, barely half-filled and devoid of life, is downright depressing. Any lingering romanticism of the pioneering spirit of expansion is soundly put to rest with these bleak images. Ironically, it is nature that the developments are selling. According to the promotional literature, Fletcher’s Meadow Homes “are painstakingly wrought from the natural surroundings paying ultimate respect to maintaining views, woodlands and access to creeks and parks.” The inherent contradictions between word and reality are again at play, but the artist also poses questions about our relationship to the natural world at large. The dichotomy between the yearning for nature and the overwhelming desire to control that nature echoes other facets of the suburb.

These manufactured environments show a human instinct to make life foolproof by forcing reality to conform to our needs. Although the vistas they provide are far from enticing, the images already show signs of inhabitants. We are reminded that even in this simulated environment real lives are destined to unfold. What is troublesome about the homes is not simply their physical homogeneity, but the realization that their similarities somehow reflect our collective desires. This dread of home ownership is characterized by novelist Richard Ford, not so much as fear but as “the cold, unwelcome, built-in-America realization that we’re just like the other schmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his stunted lusts, quaking over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable mold.”

The choices we are given to express our individuality are pre-ordained and equally stifling. The tightly controlled developments allow for some alterations, giving the consumer a limited ability to customize their purchase. To define their individuality, homeowners are left with cosmetic decisions such as of flooring, hardware, and, of course, color. In the Intersection series, Drummond reintroduces the highly palatable color fields of the Martha Stewart Collection. The signs within the painted surfaces are now rendered blank. Contained within the void is the suggestion of rejected street names. It turns out that the power developers have over the naming of streets has its limitations.

Within the long litany of unacceptable terms outlined by the city, many names are limited for ease in travel and communication, avoiding duplication and confusion in spelling and pronunciation. But others policies are concerned with miscommunications of a more social ilk. One policy states: ”streets named after living individuals are inappropriate since there could be future circumstances or difficulties that a living individual encounters that lead to an inappropriate connotation for that name.” Here we see the fear of a street name “haunting” a locale in an altogether different way than Benjamin’s usage. Made clear is the distinction between the reality of a community and its projected image. The messiness of real life cannot be reflected in the city streets on which it plays out. In other words, we won’t be seeing a Martha Stewart Court anytime soon.

This Could be Anywhere, This Could be Everywhere

In the video This Could be Anywhere, This Could be Everywhere we witness the changing complexion of the contemporary suburb. The piece serves as an intricate visual portrait of the town of Brampton, Ontario – a city located on the outskirts of Toronto that serves as Drummond’s subject throughout the exhibition. Intertwined with footage from of the town itself are fifty-second images of its inhabitants, a culturally diverse blend that challenges suburban stereotypes while simultaneously pointing to the new reality of exurban life.

The image many retain of suburbia is still partially rooted in its early days. The term can call to mind a certain 1950s “idealization” of the nuclear family – an imaginary world of appliances, martinis, and backyard barbeques where living is purported to be easy. Although it is true that these promises of relative safety and plentiful space (combined with a strong dose of racial fear) were the original impetus for the creation of the suburbs, much has changed since the ‘white flight’ era of the Post-World War II environment. While the structure of these outlying communities remains intact, their inhabitants insert diversity within an environment of sameness. Large populations of immigrant families are locating their version of the North American Dream within today’s suburbs, a manifestation of what urbanist architect, Edgardo Contini called the “universal aspiration,” a cross-cultural desire to own one’s home.

The audio reinserts the parameters in which these lives take place. A woman’s voice reads off names of existing streets while a man’s reads a list of some rejected monikers. The dialog between the two forms a binary rhythm in which the viewer is left to contemplate the nature of the naming process. Again questions of the authorship of these environments are raised. Weaved together with the visuals of the town, these words seem arbitrary choices of an unseen narrator, far removed from the reality of the city’s inhabitants. Drummond’s video points to the divide between the projection of the suburb and the experience of living within that environment.

This investigation into the area between perception and reality is at the core of Jeremy Drummond’s work. By presenting us with a subject that we already ‘know,’ the artist is asking us to step beyond the picket fences of our prefabricated positions. Suburbia has long been characterized as either saint or devil, but through the course of this exhibition we see it for what it really is: human… complex, conflicted, and flawed. In short, Jeremy Drummond has done the unthinkable – he has rendered the monotony of the suburbs unpredictable.

Biography:

Cindy Stockton Moore is a Brooklyn based painter, currently working as an adjunct professor at a number of schools in the Metropolitan area. She is the Art Editor of www.ducts.org and frequent contributor to NY Arts Magazine. Cindy would like to extend warm thanks to her sister-in-law, Marty Stockton, for her insights into the world of urban planning.

___

This essay originally appeared in the catalogue “Jeremy Drummond: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” produced by the Anderson Gallery, Drake University, Des Moines, IA. USA.

A different version of this essay was published in the January/February 2007 edition of NY Arts magazine.

___

Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen Werk in Gesammelte Schriften,, Volume 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982.) trans.SamueWeber, l in “Streets, Squares and Theaters,” (Duke University Press, 2003) p 22.

Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961) p 486.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, University of California Press, 1977. p33

ibid, p 42

Mattamy Homes, Fletcher’s Meadow, http://www.mattamyhomes.com/communities/fletchers/sub.asp?id=169

Richard Ford, Independence Day, (Vintage:New York, 1995) p 57

Planning Design and Development Dept, Street Naming Policy, Brampton Ontario, 2005, p8.

Joel Kotkin, “The New Suburbanism,” Urban Affairs, June 6, 2005 (New American Foundation: Washington DC)


Recent Work		Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere Since 2005, the majority of Drummond's works have been conceived as components of a larger body of work entitled Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. This ongoing project incorporates various media (painted works, sound, video, and photography) to reveal issues surrounding landscape development, cultural diversity, and mediated experience within contemporary suburban environments. Of particular interest are the relationships between perception/representation and reality/imagination within this often generalized, seemingly homogenous context. Installation Images: Guy L'heureux Centre des Arts Actuels Skol, Montreal, QC Click Image for Details Click Image for Details Click Image for Details Click Image for Details Jeremy Drummond: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere Essay by Cindy Stockton-Moore It is tempting to read Jeremy Drummond’s recent work as a straightforward critique of the suburban way of life. After all, suburbia is an easy target -- the cookie cutter houses, the false sense of security, the failed promise of domestic bliss. How simple it would be to look at his candy-colored icons as wayward road-posts en-route to a doomed North American dream! Scholars, artists, and urban planners have been bemoaning the woes of exurban growth for the past fifty years; it’s a comfortable stance, an accepted view. But in Everybody Knows this is Nowhere Jeremy Drummond takes a closer look -- close enough to find difference in sameness, diversity amid the conformity. His investigation into the love-hate relationship we have with our environments moves beyond physical geography to question shared ideas of identity and community. Street Signs Chances are the name of the street you grew up on or the road where your best friend lived is as easy to remember as that of your first love. These seemingly random words serve as markers down the proverbial memory lane. In the translation between location and context, the monikers of the sites may gain personal importance but lose semiotic and historical impact. The text of our environment becomes so encoded in our existence that the words themselves become difficult to see. In the Street Sign Series, Jeremy Drummond forces us to look again at that seemingly ubiquitous text. Divorced from the personal connotations and physical surroundings, the absurdity of the street names becomes apparent. Photographs taken from actual intersections create playful puns in this carefully orchestrated grouping. Viewers ponder the strange chimera formed at the crossing of Canada Goose and Dolphin Song or the implied promise of Fidelity Avenue and Honeymoon Drive. Equally important is the relationship between the romanticism of the open road and the implied domesticity of these pieces. It is telling that the pastel hues are culled entirely from the Martha Stewart Collection. Their names (Scented Notepaper, Cat’s Whiskers, Violet Powder) evoke Stewart’s particular brand of saccharine nostalgia. A Cake Batter painted home on the corner of HoneyBee and Sugarcane? It’s enough to make you ill, but these ideals – which are often in direct contrast to the way we live our lives – are at the core of many consumer transactions we make on a daily basis. In its simplicity, Jeremy Drummond’s work asks a complex question; whose sweet dreams are these anyway? In a sense, the naming process is most aptly summarized by his documentation of the intersection of Culture and Whitewash. On a bureaucratic level, the determination of street-names (or odonymns) is a fairly straightforward process. Today, most new odonymns are proposed by the controlling powers of a particular subdivision, namely the developers. The names they choose often reflect the clientele they hope to attract. Monikers that are meant to denote class, like traditional English nomenclature, are used to provide a tone of decorum – to add a sense of history to a community with no relative past. In the same spirit of irony, urban planners note developers’ inclination to name a street after the natural environment they destroyed, as in the case of Fletcher’s Meadow. This is not a new phenomenon, in fact Walter Benjamin brings up similar instances in his article The Streets of Paris in which he speaks of “long vanished” landmarks that still “haunt” neighborhoods where they may or may not have existed. This brings up the idea of location as a generalized text and site for discourse, a reoccurring theme in Drummond’s work. A more tangible form of semiotics, each sign possesses an enticing materiality. The photographs, printed as die-cut automobile decals, are mounted on custom-painted steel-- the metallic gleam and slick finish of the auto-body paint has the allure of a newly waxed car. The promise of prosperity and happiness reflects in the shiny surface of these ironic billboards for the American Way. By visually referencing the automobile, the Street Sign Series reminds the viewer of the symbiotic relationship between the suburbs and the advent of driving culture. The North American obsession with speed and broad expanses has direct influence on the propagation of sprawl. The correlation led to what urban historian, Lewis Mumford, called “an encapsulated life” based on “the absurd belief that space and rapid locomotion are the chief ingredients of a good life.” Drive By This encapsulated life, in which man vacillates between vehicle and home, is indeed what many new housing developments are built to accomplish. With their circuitous routes, prominent driveways, and omnipresent cul-de-sacs, the suburbs are dependent on driving culture. Not only do we witness this visually, the majority of our collective experience in the planned environments takes place within a car. In this way, speed not only dictates the aesthetics of the suburbs, it also defines the way that we view them. The Drive By portion of the exhibition is a series of seventy-four video stills that investigate the complexities of this rapid perception. Taken from a moving vehicle, Drummond’s images blur the line between rural and ‘developed’ communities. They are apt metaphors for the quickly changing visage of the North American landscape. But the raking shots also imply the speed in which society moves through environments and the cursory modes of “seeing” often employed while doing so. The landscape between Point A and Point B becomes increasingly compressed until all that remains is a ghostly, indistinguishable impression of what has flashed before the passenger. The collapse of distance caused by rapid transportation is not solely a contemporary concern. The “annihilation of space by time,” as Karl Marx put it, has been discussed since the advent of the railroad in the nineteenth century; it is analyzed at length in Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s 1977 article “The Railway Journey.” In this article Schivelbusch addresses the visual impact of travel: simply stated, increased speed leads to more visual stimuli to absorb at a quicker pace. This inundation of images not only causes stressful viewing, it also leads to a more cursory experience of the landscape – closer to a reproduction of that environment than the reality of it. Viewed through that frame, Drive By presents a thrice-mediated view -- each video-still existing as a documented experience… of a simulated view… of a manufactured reality. Although they are still-images, they function as a loop, reflections of reflections in a Borgesian house of mirrors. Through his use of video stills, Jeremy Drummond is visually referencing an equally pervasive component of suburban life– the television. By equating the windshield of the car with the screen of the television, the artist parallels the rapidly moving images we absorb. He is also calling to question our role in those images. The driver of a car has some agency – surely it is their choice which route they will ultimately take. But as the landscape between places becomes more and more similar, what does that choice really entail? Intersections The changing landscape is documented in the photographic series, Intersections. In these images, we see an environment in flux. Desolate construction sites and man-made environments depict the paradoxical phases of development: the subjugation of natural habitat and the reinsertion of a more perfected version of nature. Here we witness the replacement of the landscape for ‘landscaping.’ In Fletcher’s Meadow, nearly identical homes box-in a man-made lake. The violated land still shows the scars of bulldozers and can barely support the fledging trees, tethered to the ground to remain upright. The ovoid lake, barely half-filled and devoid of life, is downright depressing. Any lingering romanticism of the pioneering spirit of expansion is soundly put to rest with these bleak images. Ironically, it is nature that the developments are selling. According to the promotional literature, Fletcher’s Meadow Homes “are painstakingly wrought from the natural surroundings paying ultimate respect to maintaining views, woodlands and access to creeks and parks.” The inherent contradictions between word and reality are again at play, but the artist also poses questions about our relationship to the natural world at large. The dichotomy between the yearning for nature and the overwhelming desire to control that nature echoes other facets of the suburb. These manufactured environments show a human instinct to make life foolproof by forcing reality to conform to our needs. Although the vistas they provide are far from enticing, the images already show signs of inhabitants. We are reminded that even in this simulated environment real lives are destined to unfold. What is troublesome about the homes is not simply their physical homogeneity, but the realization that their similarities somehow reflect our collective desires. This dread of home ownership is characterized by novelist Richard Ford, not so much as fear but as “the cold, unwelcome, built-in-America realization that we’re just like the other schmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his stunted lusts, quaking over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable mold.” The choices we are given to express our individuality are pre-ordained and equally stifling. The tightly controlled developments allow for some alterations, giving the consumer a limited ability to customize their purchase. To define their individuality, homeowners are left with cosmetic decisions such as of flooring, hardware, and, of course, color. In the Intersection series, Drummond reintroduces the highly palatable color fields of the Martha Stewart Collection. The signs within the painted surfaces are now rendered blank. Contained within the void is the suggestion of rejected street names. It turns out that the power developers have over the naming of streets has its limitations. Within the long litany of unacceptable terms outlined by the city, many names are limited for ease in travel and communication, avoiding duplication and confusion in spelling and pronunciation. But others policies are concerned with miscommunications of a more social ilk. One policy states: ”streets named after living individuals are inappropriate since there could be future circumstances or difficulties that a living individual encounters that lead to an inappropriate connotation for that name.” Here we see the fear of a street name “haunting” a locale in an altogether different way than Benjamin’s usage. Made clear is the distinction between the reality of a community and its projected image. The messiness of real life cannot be reflected in the city streets on which it plays out. In other words, we won’t be seeing a Martha Stewart Court anytime soon. This Could be Anywhere, This Could be Everywhere In the video This Could be Anywhere, This Could be Everywhere we witness the changing complexion of the contemporary suburb. The piece serves as an intricate visual portrait of the town of Brampton, Ontario – a city located on the outskirts of Toronto that serves as Drummond’s subject throughout the exhibition. Intertwined with footage from of the town itself are fifty-second images of its inhabitants, a culturally diverse blend that challenges suburban stereotypes while simultaneously pointing to the new reality of exurban life. The image many retain of suburbia is still partially rooted in its early days. The term can call to mind a certain 1950s “idealization” of the nuclear family – an imaginary world of appliances, martinis, and backyard barbeques where living is purported to be easy. Although it is true that these promises of relative safety and plentiful space (combined with a strong dose of racial fear) were the original impetus for the creation of the suburbs, much has changed since the ‘white flight’ era of the Post-World War II environment. While the structure of these outlying communities remains intact, their inhabitants insert diversity within an environment of sameness. Large populations of immigrant families are locating their version of the North American Dream within today’s suburbs, a manifestation of what urbanist architect, Edgardo Contini called the “universal aspiration,” a cross-cultural desire to own one’s home. The audio reinserts the parameters in which these lives take place. A woman’s voice reads off names of existing streets while a man’s reads a list of some rejected monikers. The dialog between the two forms a binary rhythm in which the viewer is left to contemplate the nature of the naming process. Again questions of the authorship of these environments are raised. Weaved together with the visuals of the town, these words seem arbitrary choices of an unseen narrator, far removed from the reality of the city’s inhabitants. Drummond’s video points to the divide between the projection of the suburb and the experience of living within that environment. This investigation into the area between perception and reality is at the core of Jeremy Drummond’s work. By presenting us with a subject that we already ‘know,’ the artist is asking us to step beyond the picket fences of our prefabricated positions. Suburbia has long been characterized as either saint or devil, but through the course of this exhibition we see it for what it really is: human… complex, conflicted, and flawed. In short, Jeremy Drummond has done the unthinkable – he has rendered the monotony of the suburbs unpredictable. Biography: Cindy Stockton Moore is a Brooklyn based painter, currently working as an adjunct professor at a number of schools in the Metropolitan area. She is the Art Editor of www.ducts.org and frequent contributor to NY Arts Magazine. Cindy would like to extend warm thanks to her sister-in-law, Marty Stockton, for her insights into the world of urban planning. ___ This essay originally appeared in the catalogue “Jeremy Drummond: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” produced by the Anderson Gallery, Drake University, Des Moines, IA. USA. A different version of this essay was published in the January/February 2007 edition of NY Arts magazine. ___ Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen Werk in Gesammelte Schriften,, Volume 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982.) trans.SamueWeber, l in “Streets, Squares and Theaters,” (Duke University Press, 2003) p 22. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961) p 486. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, University of California Press, 1977. p33 ibid, p 42 Mattamy Homes, Fletcher’s Meadow, http://www.mattamyhomes.com/communities/fletchers/sub.asp?id=169 Richard Ford, Independence Day, (Vintage:New York, 1995) p 57 Planning Design and Development Dept, Street Naming Policy, Brampton Ontario, 2005, p8. Joel Kotkin, “The New Suburbanism,” Urban Affairs, June 6, 2005 (New American Foundation: Washington DC)