POSTCARD PROJECT
PLACE: Urban development (neighborhood) in a city (Chicago/Detroit).
ISSUE/PROBLEM: With this series of postcards, I am highlighting the erasure of native people, places, and things that happens in the name of progress and construction of new architecture/beautification. I am also placing emphasis on the nature of the natural vs the manufactured.
RELEVANCE: Although issues of erasure and displacement are complex and don't directly affect every person, it is still of critical relevance to us as a society to be aware of them. Conscious recognition and responsibility of one's affect on other people and spaces ought to be a concern for any ethical person.
ARTIST STATEMENT: Claiming and reclaiming spaces, people, and places is a constant cycle throughout history, almost as ancient as the cycle of life and death itself. With this project, I propose a civic-minded response. My intent is that people will not only question their perspective with seemingly concrete imaginatives, but they will be mobilized to some form of action. The solution to issues like erasure, gentrification, red-lining, the destruction of nature, and the waste of organic resources is a body of people actively engaged in the act of care. Care may take many forms, just a few easily accessible forms are: awareness, maintenance, and research. These activities help a person to form a deep connection with their surroundings.
There is a strong desire within most people for novelty - for clean white spaces that have been stripped bare of mess, stripped of context, and stripped all too often of real lives and livelihoods that once inhabited them. We don't associate the new with violence done to the past. I champion a perspective where the old is treasured and celebrated even as the new appears. Innovation should not be stopped, nor should progress; however, they must not be for the benefit of some and at the expense or pain of others.
ILLUSION
In this piece, I employ Magritte's strategies of juxtaposition and scale to make the familiar strange.
The thought behind using water and the forest in this urban development is to indicate a ghostly past. I aim to emphasize the mutability of perspective. What we see, what we know, and what we think are all subjective; they are feeling rather than fact. With this piece I hope to disorient viewers and encourage them to explore beyond what they see into a multi-layered context of past and future.
In this piece I draw upon Bamberger's quest to beautify reality. In my chosen place, an urban development, there once stood untamed natural landscape.
It's essential to understand what once was to fully appreciate what is and even what could be. Although this location now houses contemporary and minimalistic architecture, the potential of buried natural beauty may continue its legacy through the imaginations of those who use the space. The repeated form of the window creates a framework to imagine the cycle of birth, destruction, and new life.
REPETITION
TRANSFORMATION
This piece is heavily modeled after Skoglund. The use of a warm, almost sepia toned palette is a more neutral approach to color dominant work.
In this piece, I combine urban development and natural landscape as almost a curtain. The viewer may determine whether the scene before them is just beginning or if it is coming to a close.
A consistent theme throughout this project is the idea of context.
My intent for this piece is that one might recognize that the price for novelty and innovation is often the erasure of things past. Inspired by Kruger and Holzer, I am to say that there are always predecessors to progress. Whether living beings, pieces of architectural history, or the displacement of nature, there is always a cost for newness.
REVEALING/CONCEALMENT
