Building and Rebuilding
Asylum Arts at Repair the World, Brooklyn, 2017
This group exhibition addresses the effects of the rapidly-changing landscape in our urban surroundings as a result of sprawl, evident by endless demolitions, empty lots and new high-rises. The works in the show contain familiar elements from city landscapes, such as scaffolding, urban detritus, abandoned buildings, and public gardens, all addressing the hurried transformation of cityscapes closely related with gentrification. The social and architectural shifts in which many neighborhoods in Brooklyn (and elsewhere) encounter are primary themes within the artists’ works. Some of the works in the show are more abstract than others, presenting imagined structures as a way of exploring the notion of permanence and impermanence in “new” territories and spaces. Other works in the show mirror a tangled topography and inspire association with urban sprawl, interrogating urbanism and the tension that occurs due to shifts in landscape. Participating artists: Noa Charuvi, Esperanza Mayobre, Kristyna And Marek Milde, Naomi Safran-Hon, Ivan Stojakovic.
Destruction is a subject matter present in the works of Esperanza Mayobre and Naomi Safran-Hon. Mayobre’s architectural drawing, Everybody knows that cities are built to be destroyed, drawn directly on the walls of the gallery, is of unknown structures, evocative of construction and de-construction of buildings. Resembling piles of frames, the artist considers these rectangle shapes to be “monuments to a city that no longer exists.” The depiction of collapsing fragments in Mayobre’s site-specific piece is also reminiscent in Safran-Hon’s works on paper, which are the ghost image of the paintings they accompany. In this series, the artist expresses a state of abandonment and chaos, suggesting notions of displacement, and the way in which vacated homes, either by choice or by force, turn into ruins. The textures in her paintings are vivid and tactile, intensifying the idea of place (or the lack of it), while the mirroring drawings further emphasize the loss of its identity. Surrounded with the reality of gentrification almost everywhere, both these artists’ works convey the way low-income neighborhoods are essentially erased due to new investments, pricing out longtime residents.
The work of Kristyna And Marek Milde, Public Library, is a sculpture of a growing archive of found books the artists retrieved from New York City waste stream. The piece functions as an interactive library allowing for browsing and reading of over 30 book collections. Composed from a variety of custom sized rectangular segments,the library takes form of an irregular structure, recalling the architecture of modern buildings and new developments often seen in neighborhoods taken over by investors and real-estate moguls. The artists consider the library as an “imaginary portraits of unknown characters reflecting the multitude of unique contexts and cultural narratives defining a place such as NYC.” As though mapping the city’s demography through text— from philosophy and history books found in one area, to romance and novels located in another—the artists carefully arranged these books, juxtaposing contrasting subject matters and book owners. Similar to Safran-Hon’s and Mayobre’s narrative of displacement and abandonment, the Mildes’ library serves as a monument to lost places.
Exploring the process and the craft of building, the artist Noa Charuvi depicts various construction zones she encountered around New York. In her series Construction Workers, Charuvi examines and conveys the notion of labor by focusing primarily on the builders themselves, rather than the buildings. In a different body of work, Assembly, 2015 and Blue Hose And Rebars, 2015, she solely portrays building materials and equipment as though attributing human qualities to these inanimate objects. Portraying the metal beams, steel frames, and scaffolding that have hijacked the city’s horizon—sights we encounter daily— raise the question of what existed in these places previously and who will be living there now?
With New York’s endless construction sites, one wonders about the destruction of natural habitats and the absence of green space. Ivan Stojakovic abstract topographies, explore the role of nature in urban places. His works, Island X, 2016 andPlastic Skyline, 2015 contain live and sustainable plants, referring to the wilderness that still remains within large metropolitan areas. By including live elements in his works, Stojakovic emphasizes the dichotomy of natural and artificial forestation in urban areas. On one hand, by erecting new buildings, developers destroy existing environments of nature; on the other hand, adding more public parks and gardens for the beautification of a city makes it appealing to more developers, generating additional potential for real estate. This phenomenon is almost too familiar in urban ecology circles. Adding green space and other amenities to under-resourced neighborhoods can attract wealthier outsiders, who displace long-time residents.
The notion of neighborhood improvement often comes over the expense of lower-income tenants. Or, in certain cases, a community may get together and do the neighborhood cleanup on their own- and then lose it to new, more affluent residents. The aim of this exhibition is to raise questions about the outcome of urban sprawl, and explore how architecture and urbanism affect existing communities.
