CLEAN ROOMS, LOW RATES

Over a two year period in the early 2010s, Brendan Barry logged 22,000 miles driving back and forth across the US, photographing, among other things, empty motel rooms. Inspired by the history of motels in some of the greatest stories of all time, the writer Jeff Parker provided fictional texts to go with a selection of these photographs.

Clean Rooms, Low Rates is a collaborative, cross-genre exploration of the American motel. Standing at the intersection of economics, aesthetics, poetry, sculpture, documentation, and fiction, Clean Rooms, Low Rates sheds light on the problematic character of seemingly ordinary things. By playfully and collaboratively immersing ourselves in a private-turned-public and mundane-turned-psychedelic space, especially one as aesthetically charged and culturally specific as a motel room, we allow ourselves to experience and examine the myth of the American dream.