Riffing on Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 conceptual artwork, One and Three Chairs, “Electric Box Graffiti” by Ric Kasini Kadour is twenty-one analogue collages and four photographs presented in a grid and offered to the viewer as twenty-five images of the same thing. The artist invites us to consider visual literacy in an age flooded with photographic images. Can we look at the same photograph over and over and see something completely different each time?

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Photographs make us look at something: a glacier landscape; a couple walking in the street; an overturned car; a murder. They provide a container that holds a collection of visual information. Presumably, we look into that container and we learn things about the world. Dorothea Lange said, “To be good, photographs have to be full of the world.” To which George P. Elliott, writing about Lange, added, “[T]his benefit of seeing…can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the madding mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering us all our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image…the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.” I don’t think that is the whole story.

Over the last few years, I’ve been obsessed with something Marvin Heiferman wrote, “We know that photographs work, but not quite how they do.” I am interested in how we expand and deepen our sense of visual literacy in world flooded with photographic images. Such an inquiry led me to the question, Can we look at the same photograph over and over and see something completely different each time? My pursuit of an answer tangled itself with what I thought was a separate inquiry around Place as Archive, How do we make sense of our communities? How do we see them as literary critic Michael Sheringham put so well as “dynamic process, restless motion, multiple chronologies and levels of meaning”? Or put another way, How do we make the familiar, unfamiliar and therefore intriguing and a source of curiosity and wonder?

On the west side of St. Roch Avenue between St. Claude and Rampart in New Orleans stands an electric box; one of those pieces of utility infrastructure that must be doing important things but no one quite knows exactly what. It’s a feature of the city that is noticeable, but not memorable. It’s part of the furniture of the neighborhood. This one in particular is covered in posters and graffiti; always changing as a street artist, concert promoter, or political activist wheatpastes a new layer or spraypaints their tag. The weather and occasionally the box’s owner (or rather their employees) strip it back down or throw a layer of beige paint on it. I like to think of graffiti as the city authoring itself and I enjoy watching its evolution as new fragments come and go. Could I use art to make it noteworthy?

My process began with photographing the box, both in situ, as it sat there, and close-up, like a crime scene photographer trying to capture every detail. This was done all at once. This became my source material. In the studio, I printed and cut up these photographs and recomposed them in as many ways as possible and set the collages against multi-colored backgrounds to underscore my point: Each one of these pictures is the same but different; a forgettable piece of the world, an overlooked element of place. Presented in this manner, the patina, texture, rhythm, life of the community becomes visible. Text becomes asemic. The electric box becomes poetry. If we can see the benign furniture of our neighborhoods as poetry, then perhaps we can see our neighbors as equally marvelous.