Where do fighter jets go when they stop flying? What happens to shipping containers when they can no longer be used for freight? The answer is invisible to most of us, but for Cassio Vasconcellosabandoned trains, planes and cars are far from forgotten.
The artist from São Paulo has been fascinated by the relationship between people and landscape for more than four decades. Over the years, his work has captured dramatic impressions of vast cities around the world, often from the air, giving rise to an ongoing series called Collectives that condenses details of urban infrastructure such as highways and parking lots into vast, everywhere compositions.
Collectives 2, to which these images belong, focuses solely on the mesmerizing – and bewildering – amount of discarded vehicles and metal parked indefinitely in inconspicuous places. Vasconcellos draws from tens of thousands of aerial photographs he has taken of junkyards, scrap yards, airplane graveyards and landfills to create remarkable, large-scale composite images.
The artist has mapped all the junkyards around São Paulo, plus many more near the Brazilian cities of Cubatão, Santos and Rio de Janeiro. He has also documented desert landscapes in the US that serve as final resting places for commercial and military aircraft.
For example, “over” takes into account numerous associated meanings, such as “overview,” “all-over,” “overdose,” or “game over.” The title refers not only to the abundance of visual information, but also to the abundance of visual information in contemporary society.
“Seeing an image like this makes it clear that there is no ‘throwing away,’” Vasconcellos says in a video about “OVER,” which took him about a year and three months to complete. “This amount of things that are in the work… they are out there,” he adds. “I just put them together.”
“These photos may look like post-apocalyptic scenarios, but they could be our future,” the artist said in a statement. “We still have to learn that by throwing things away and putting them out of sight, we don’t create them
disappear. In fact, they persist elsewhere and outlive us the most
of that time.”
Vasconcellos removes individual shipping containers, trucks, waste containers and piles of waste in a painstaking and time-consuming digital process. He never repeats an element in a composition, and each piece is scaled and situated so that the shadows align with the direction of the light. He then adds dust and dirt to the surfaces, simultaneously emphasizing the patina of time and an uncanny sense of timelessness.
Without people, Vasconcellos’ images nevertheless describe the human predilection to produce, consume and discard. “It’s a bit nonsense because there are paths, but you don’t really understand how a person or a car can get in there – or get out,” says Vasconcellos. “It is a possible world, but at the same time an absurd world.”
Vasconcellos is represented by Nara Roesler Galleryand you can see more of his work at his website And Instagram.
