588-Verbenas on the Desert, 2008 by Phillip Jung
For those of us who own or have owned a car, you know that beyond the car's transportation purposes and uses it is also an extension of your personal space—a floating consulate of homebase in foreign territories known as public spaces. Inside your parked car, you can read, eat, space out, sleep, cry, dance or just sit in silence, waiting for something to happen. Inside your car, you feel safe, protected; you can just be yourself, because it is a moving castle—your castle.
At the same time, your car also inevitably reflects you, whether you want it to or not. In that sense, the modern personal automobile moved the boundary between "public" and "private" outward. Your mobile personal bubble is exposed, or displayed even, to the public: on the street, in the garage, at the mall, by the beach, etc. It's probably beyond the primary design intentions of any car, but you can't really hide your car when it's parked outside. Contender Phillip Jung takes a peek into these mini worlds with his series Windscreen.
Sleeping Mask, 2010 by Phillip Jung
In his artist statement, Jung writes:
I see this group of images as a contemporary look at our social landscape through the windshields, or windscreens, of parked cars. I am fascinated by how these unique personal spaces can be rendered in a photographic image. A car's interior defines the line between public and private space. While peering into these spaces I wonder if the interior, often littered with personal articles, can describe the way language, religion, economy, government and other cultural phenomena play a role in the owner's life. The largest challenge of the project is taking something as iconic as the automobile and adding something new to a conversation that his been going on since its inception. The gasoline-powered vehicles that were introduced in 1896 represented freedom, hope, exploration and independence—quintessentially American ideals. By 1947, when the photographer Wright Morris made his image of an aging Model T, those early ideals had already begun to deteriorate. Like Morris's pictures, Windscreen is about a culture that is disappearing. When combing through neighborhoods for cars, I look first for the way light enters a car and renders color. If I find nothing inside its cabin that tells something about its owner, I move on. Above all, the car needs to be drivable or just recently taken off the road. If a car sits for too long uninhabited, it loses something. The composite of this space reflects who we are, where we come from and, possibly, where we are going.
Untitled, from the series Windscreen, by Phillip Jung
Born in New York, Phillip Jung now calls Boston home, but he has lived and studied photography on both coasts—at San Francisco Art Institute for a BFA, and at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (where he currently teaches undergraduate students) for an MFA.