ARTIST SPOTLIGHT // TIM PORTLOCK AND ‘NICKELS FROM HEAVEN’
Deconstructing the Cycle of Sky-High Inequalities
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
EXCERPT //
Artist Tim Portlock has made photo-realistic, architecturally based images of metropolitan scenery before. But in his Nickels from Heaven series, he even more vividly captures the churn—the yin and yang of dynamism and decay that circle one another in urban areas—where despite the constant construction, inequality always seems to end up front and center in the picture.
Portlock’s series takes its name from Pennies from Heaven, the Depression-era film (and eponymous song) starring Bing Crosby, which recounts the story of a wrongly imprisoned singer whose life collides with a young girl down on her luck. Inflation is everywhere, then—as now. People are hurting. Despite our American ideals, someone always seems to be asking, “Brother, can you spare a dime?” Our class inequality, so vividly reported in books such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 Nickel and Dimed, continues to widen.
But all those people whose dreams have been deferred, and the ones who do or don’t employ them—are totally absent in Portock’s images in Nickels from Heaven. By removing the humans—and therefore their specific identities—the concept of inequality itself is allowed to take center stage. While anyone who knows anything about cities would already be bringing with them the racialized component of the inequality on view in so many neighborhoods, the vacant landscapes allow us greater freedom to see the more gutting class aspect that affects people of all ethnic backgrounds. In life and in Portlock’s images, places are built very specifically to divide people by income levels; our societal values are mirrored in our built environment.
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