Circumambulate_
Ongoing
Circumambulate_* is a long-term observation of the structural and material conditions of New York's Financial District. It continues my interest in site-responsive works, but with a vastly extended scope and approach. Process will be treated equal to outcome, and source materials will circulate through different perspectives and formats.
*The title refers to a passage in the first chapter of Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "...circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?..."
Work in Progress
More details will be added over time
Circumambulate_ on Instagram
A mix of observations, visual documentation, screenshots, texts, research, etc., around the entanglements of financial and social formgiving, shared on a platform that represents both.
This is Not an Index (working title)
In planning: A built structure that holds materials, sketches and notebooks, photographs, writings, etc. Ideas start from and return to this core, resulting in the circulation of source materials through different work groups with shifting perspectives and formats.
The Ways of the Water (working title)
In planning: A moving image work that follows water as it connects the district's built environment across time and space. Water is recognized here as a shapeshifting form that flows from living matter to chemical element, resource, metaphor, trading asset, natural force, etc., and with each shift changes its relationship to its surrounding.
Untitled (working title)
A series of text works that address the processes of (material) transformation both in the neighborhood and in the digital realm of financial enterprises. Forms and formats for these texts will vary.
Untitled (working title)
A photographic series that reconsiders the ideological program of architectural facades by focusing on their role as (physical) thresholds, which makes them facilitators of the in-between. By combining photography with the method of digital and physical collage, the work reconfigures spatial arrangements and material conditions to introduce new narrative elements.
Bulletins (working title)
A series of image/text works that follows architectural and art sites through their entanglement with financial structures. Examples include:
Bulletin #1 was inspired by the resemblance between a fintech marketing graphic and Herbert Bayer's Marble Garden at the Aspen Institute Campus
Bulletin #2 was inspired by a digital marketing campaign that placed Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column, which is owned by MoMA, New York, in an apartment interior at the Four Seasons Private Residencies
About
My interest in both the material and form-giving conditions within New York's Financial District began during a ten-month studio residency* in the neighborhood in 2009/10 and has continued since. It was captured by the district's transformational arc from colonial trading post to global banking center to a site of catastrophe to most recently an upscale residential neighborhood and tourist destination. While these changes occurred over centuries, they also began to accumulate and overlay with each other in a shared space.
This most recent development of residential conversion and urban luxurification took shape when financial institutions began to move out of the district. Yet this shift didn't mean that the financial frameworks associated with "Wall Street," an industry and ideological moniker that originated in this neighborhood, had left. Instead it showed that its structure and logic had already successfully transferred into the micro levels of urban form, social structure, and digital networks.
Circumambulate_ takes this latest transformation as a starting point for an extended observation of the district through the lens of formgiving. The term is understood here not only as a sculptural process that shapes thought and (physical) matter, but also as a tool for storytelling and projection, key tools within finance, that influence perception and behavior on an often massive scale.
A major focus within this project are the aforementioned micro levels, which are treated as individual, even intimate sites that ground the entanglements of financial abstraction with the minutiae of daily life. They serve as physical and digital 'excavation' sites and also as reminders that finance as a concept is neither pure, nor purely rational, nor does it operate in a vacuum. Instead it coexists with other conditions, which leads to the mixing of the abstract with the concrete, the strategic with the improvised, and the permanent with the ephemeral.
Driven by an interest in the "messiness" and even violence of this coexistence but also its potency, Circumambulate_ is an attempt to shift the perception around financial narratives and bring the conversation back to the foundational and participatory conditions that lay at the base of any formgiving process.
*The residency was awarded by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), an organization that matches empty offices spaces in the Financial District with artists. During my residency I realized the on-site work I Prefer To that referenced a different work by Herman Melville.
Circumambulate (formerly known as Share) received a grant from the Puffin Foundation (2015).