RAISE
public art project for Owl's Head Park
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NYC
I often work with found objects from urban areas. By gathering them and using them as foundations for my traveling modules, I have already build in the sculptures a part of the neighbourhoods where they are going, their stories of displacement, journeys and arrivals of new immigrant artists.
I worked with students from MERVO and other schools like Fort Hamilton High School and Sheffield Hallam University on this project, telling the tale of objects of navigation and of arrival to a new world.
One of the results of the current geopolitical reality is extreme dislocation. War, fear, poverty and misery currently force millions to abandon their homes to dangerous and uncertain futures. Even when not faced with such extreme existential choices, it is fundamental in human experience to imagine an escape from lives that seemingly bind them to results of choices not of their own making.
This installation provides both the recognition of that struggle and the means by which to escape it in our imagination.
On my modules I added the materials of marble, surfaces relating to the usage of marble in Greece in sculpture since antiquity but also the faux-marble aspect that seeks to add a layer of luxury to an object made of scraps.