I am infatuated with urban spaces and the relationships people have with them. If you have ever wandered a city late at night, half-lost, looking desperately for something — anything — that you haven’t seen before, hoping to find inspiration in the everyday and the extraordinary alike, than you speak my language. Through my work in the audio, visual and tactile realms, I seek to explore the psychology of cities, emphasizing the moments of serendipity, paranoia, alienation and discovery that urbania invokes.
New York City has long harbored a reputation as a tough city; a mean city, one that makes or breaks its residents — often times the latter. However, it’s also been the perfect place to find beautiful moments of surprise and hope, especially in the city’s grittier areas. One never knows what one might find on a night-time walk of lower Manhattan, and that’s something I seek to emphasize and exploit. However, while I hope in some spaces to create tiny pockets of discovery and enjoyment, I also hope to bring light to the paranoid fears that have taken residence in our collective conscious.
Urban spaces can inspire the best and worst in everyone, bringing out the extremes of our imaginations. When paired with the right triggers, these visions can develop a life of their own in the night hours. City-dwellers tend to take pride in their ability to plan a safe route from point A to point B at night, and know which side of what street will serve them best in this endeavor. Stereotypes are held as fact, patterns become ritual. Residents of this city are encouraged to see and say something; to find reasons to fear the unfamiliar. That, honestly, terrifies me.
In this project, I aim to address this growing trend towards fear and lost serendipity while temporarily highlighting a temporary eyesore that blankets our city’s buildings. New York City, possibly more than any US city, is besieged by construction and beautification processes that flood the sidewalks and streets of this largely pedestrian city. The scaffold systems in many neighborhoods have become associated as one with the very buildings they shroud, often times providing a familiar and frightening building face when removed. And while they offer cover for the building, they often serve as ominous constructs for passers-by, harboring unknown complications to a complicated life.
As scaffolding is by description a construct defined by its host building and temporary by design, it seems most appropriate to let it play host to works that are themselves nonpermanent and site-definted. So, it is my intent to project characters on these structures, living solely within the temporary boundaries of the scaffold. Using high-power projectors, I’m hoping to illustrate the good and bad in everyday life that we city-folk so often ignore, projecting our hopes and fears in shape and text. Hopefully by tripping people out of their everyday reverie for even just a moment, I will be able to reawaken some of joy and fear of exploration that seems harder and harder to relive in this city.
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