Open City: Ten Forms, Makes a Village? (2018-Present)
The installation and interactive work, Open City: Ten Forms, For a Village? is premised on the planned community of Columbia, Maryland and the challenges of integration, it was said to address. I return to a place where I grew up, to asks the question: how do you envision a place over time? What are the limits of design?
In the early 1950s American cities faced the question how to address the sprawling landscape of the region. The question of sprawl occurred concurrently with the integration of education systems across the nation. Columbia, Maryland, where my parent’s settled, in the late 1980s was designed by developer, James Rouse. The original plans for Columbia were designed around ten interconnected villages.
As an installation work, Open City: Ten Forms, For a Village? Is made of ten steel forms. Three-channel projection activates the floor space, cycling through multiple fractured images of mesh and bird netting–a core material in my practice. Viewers are invited to walk through the forms, acknowledging the precarity, that these forms might topple over at any point.
2018: The trajectory of this project began in 2018, shortly after the fifty year anniversary of Columbia’s design and development, and during an artist residency, at Merriweather District–Artist and Resident Program. This would be the first time, I would do work on a place of intimacy, and a returned to Columbia, after a substantial period of time away.
2023: The second iteration of the work, was included in the three person exhibition, After Archives at APEX Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts, near where I currently teach and work.
Now: At present the project has grown and evolved. For the last two years, I have visited archives in Maryland, alongside, worked with two research assistants that are both from the area. My desire is to activate the ten forms in site specific locations, particular to the work.