Constructed architectural prototype, placed in an urban context and photographed.
Constructed architectural prototype, placed in an urban context and photographed.
Constructed architectural prototype, placed in an urban context and photographed.
Digital Collage
MFA Work "Any City AMERICA"
Through the placement of portable objects in urban spaces, my work addresses the social process of gentrification. It is a catalyst in the discussion on the implication of change in an existing context through urban renewal or gentrification. I simulate this process by taking my own ambiguous yet familiar portable objects –miniature houses that serve as architectural prototypes-- and placing them in urban spaces. Painted white, the houses are symbolic, metaphoric, allegorical, evocative and ambiguous. Their juxtaposition in the context of apparent urban renewal is an uncanny co-existence of the old and new, certainty and uncertainty, the past, the present, or the unknown. Photographing this juxtaposition in context gives the portable object equivalence to its surrounding in both scale and effect. In reality, however, small in scale and ambiguous, the object becomes a signifier for change.