Cynthia Connolly (1964 - ), Ice Machines series, 1993-2001 |
          Asheville, North Carolina, 4-12-97, 1997 

          Panhandle, Texas, 1-31-98, 1998 

          Page, Arizona, 5-17-99, 1999 

          Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2-2-01, 2001 

Gelatin silver prints, sheet: 15 3/4 × 19 7/8 in. (40 × 50.5 cm) each |
Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Gift of an anonymous donor) |

2018.15.2434; 2018.15.2435; 2018.15.2436; 2018.15.2440 

 

From 1993 to 2001, Cynthia Connolly made several road trips across the United States with the express purpose of taking photographs. The result is her “Ice Machine” series: 20 straightforward black and white photographs of convenience store iceboxes. The photographs do not betray where they were taken, but Connolly notes the location and date on the prints themselves. As a whole, the series provides a visual archive of the artist’s personal travels, but, more poignantly, it also offers a new vision of the American landscape. Connolly does not picture expansive vistas or notable natural formations; rather, she documents a commercial product and, so, depicts every city—from Asheville to Page—as somewhat different, but essentially the same. To create this pictorial statement, Connolly drew on the tradition of typological photography, specifically Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), but her work exposes the genre's inherent subjectivity.