Courtesy the artist and Emalin gallery. LA-based artist Megan Plunkett mines Craigslist for classified ads in which a dog has inadvertently wandered into the frame. Printed out on small sheets of glossy photo paper, the relaxed-looking dogs upstage boats, cars and even a horse.
Some appear as if their presence is mostly accidental, while others are positioned centre stage as adorable sales assistants. In her dog pictures, Plunkett playfully explores the tension between a flattened image and its conditions of production, probing our relationship to the world of objects an investigation the scholar Lauren Berlant once likened to being nudged towards something new by a border collie.
Plunkett is currently exhibiting these images at Emalin gallery alongside Puppies Puppies and Gaylen Gerber as part of Condo London TANK spoke to the artist about her experience working as an unlicensed private investigator, the site-specific internet and new possibilities in image-making. To begin, I wondered if you could tell me a little about the inception of this series?
What lead you in your search for these Craigslist dog cameos? I never specifically set out to find the images, I used to and still do look at Craigslist on occasion for the myriad reasons anyone might, free stuff mostly. I think I saw my first clandestine dog in mid After that, they just seemed to keep appearing. Around that time I really started to consider the images, because they kept creeping back up to me somehow.
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What kind of relationship do you have to the process of finding these images? Is it a relaxing or compulsive kind of activity? I am a vaguely compulsive and somewhat obsessive person so that type of looking probably comes naturally to me. Special Friend 02 , Megan Plunkett, There are a lot of dogs on the internet.
