Jon Rafman demonstrates the amazing serendipity of Google Street View.
JON RAFMAN at Angell Gallery (12 Ossington) to June 2. 416-530-0444. See listing. Rating: NNNN
The world is stranger than we imagine, and nothing confirms it more than Jon Rafman's show, The Nine Eyes Of Google Street View, now at Angell.
Taking screen shots of images culled from Google's huge digital compendium of worldwide street scenes, Rafman captures two converging phenomena: the baffling weirdness of the world colliding head on with our rapacious desire to map it.
Rafman's practised eye frames moments of spectacular incongruity. Some images are from the periphery, what may be a rapidly receding frontier of the undocumented: a road ending at the edge of the Mojave Desert, a wildfire in the Yucatan, horses galloping past a cemetery in Jurby, on the Isle of Man.
There are equally uncanny urban scenes: a man enjoying a stretch on a Manhattan street, a woman in São Paulo setting a new standard for what it means to work a street corner.