Anomie
Anomie, 3:48 min video
A full-size wall projection, a floor sculpture and photographs together describe porous, collapsing and unstable urban spaces. The pictured sites constitute a range of public spaces of transportation and consumerism including retail commercial space, an urban outdoor shopping center, public mass transit, a private parking garage, and a public intersection. In the projected video, two workers scrape lead paint from a New York City subway station. The site is shrouded to protect passersby from the toxic material being stripped and replaced. The plastic tarp partially obscures and distances this image of municipal labor, audible from the street. We see these night laborers indirectly as the subway entrance is illuminated from behind. The municipal and consumer sites pictured are informed by speculative value in real estate, precarious labor and contemporary economic instability. The large-scale projection and the floor sculpture relate to the viewer experientially. Visual effects of indirect viewership, obfuscation, ambiguity and fragmentation are overlaid on images of labor, consumerism and the daily commute.