Site Specificity
Art 122 Project #4
Artist Statement:
Recently, I learned some of the history of my neighborhood, which had once been the location of the Native American Acjachemen Tribe. Had I not stopped to read the round plaque that sat at the edge of the park I had visited, it is safe to assume that I would have never known the origins of this area. This made me think, specifically about how modernization has hidden the history of the people and things that came before us. To me, one of the examples of this modernization is fire hydrants, implemented in public spaces as a safety standard, and often overlooked in a day and age where everything can be accessed with technology. But this also then brings up the topic of modernization of a whole, or rather, the advancements of techniques and methods. In the current 21st century there are improvements to technology, and in the 19th century there was the spread of industrialization, which included structures such as fire hydrants. Native American weaving is a technique that was first formed to make objects such as baskets, a modernization of its own time, which later advanced into a textile art form through the use of a loom. Inspired by this, I wanted to focus on these different aspects of modernization, selecting a white fire hydrant that is surrounded by plant life as my site, the object seemingly already out of place within a niche of fallen leaves. Knitting, another form of textile work, is similar to that of weaving, and historical as well, which is one of the main reasons why I decided to use this method to create the large sheet used in my project. I wanted to also incorporate hints of Native American weaving into this, and decided to use fallen leaves, sewing them onto the sheet so that it would take the shape of a triangle, one of the basic design elements utilized in Native American Weaving. I then draped this knitted and sewn sheet over the fire hydrant that I had selected in the beginning, having it become hidden by this cover, not letting people see the more technological advancement that was underneath it, much like how the modernization of more recent centuries inadvertently hides history and other historical advancements.
