BUILT ON THE SITE of … / Installation

Feeling grateful that I live in a town crazy enough to invite me do a little takeover of the Municipal Building. Huge thanks to the Village Arts Commission of Hastings-on-Hudson for their support and to all the wonderful folks in Village Hall who let me hang out there with my coax cable in the wee hours of the night.

BUILT ON THE SITE of...

Art Installation
Village Hall, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
April 16 – June 8, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday April 21, 6-9pm

At the street-level entrance to Hastings-on-Hudson’s Municipal Building, a Museum in the Streets sign explains to visitors and passersby that the Village Hall is “BUILT ON THE SITE of the home of Joseph Treanor, owner of a waterfront bluestone yard.” Teased from the signage, BUILT ON THE SITE of... opens up stories of the Municipal Building’s past lives, unearthing from its surfaces pages upon pages of ghostly fragments and remains. Warped paper forms fill walls, frayed communication cables travel here and there, and threaded maps spread elsewhere. These and other site-specific interventions meander through the building, where physical and administrative architectures operate not as passive backdrops for art hanging, but as active portals for imagining other times and other places.

Jenny Odell's satellite collections

Satellite Collections,digital prints, 2009-2011

Jenny Odell: "In all of my prints, I collect things that I've cut out from Google Satellite View-- parking lots, silos, landflls, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, reliably repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that read: people were here. At the same time, like any photograph, satellite imagery is also immediately an image of the past. That is, to look at satellite imagery is to look not only down upon ourselves but back in time, even if only by a matter of hours or days. In recording the moment at which things as bizarre as water parks and racetracks covered the earth, the photograph also implies that moment's own passing, encoding each tiny structure with vulnerability and pre-emptive nostagia. My desire to collect these pieces stems not only from the fascination of any collector but from a wish to save these low-resolution, sporadically-updated pixels--these strange pictures of ourselves--from time and the ephemerality of the internet. (source; found this project thanks to Design Sponge)