Street View: Urban Hellscape
Street View: An Urban Hellscape: A visual discovery and celebration of urban grit told through textiles. By Alyson Beaton
Walking down the street on any given day, I pass an auto parts store covered with illustrations of every auto part on offer within the store including, but not limited to: nuts, bolts, widgets, tires, etc…. Each graphic is painted in a two tone color scheme: yellow and red. The graphics are half heartedly applied to a building that was once beautiful, a three flat greystone with a ground floor retail space that is now an off brownish gray color with a front door that adorns a rusted metal gate with at least seven locks. Around the corner I walk past a beautifully restored 2 flat building that has been converted into a single family residence. The house is for sale for 2 million dollars.
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I drive down the street on the way to my studio, driving past a cluster of old buildings, some with historic plaques dating back to 1910. The small storefronts have had many many lives but are now adorned with a cluster of street art claiming the space as an urban corner. Adjacent to the building is a huge dirt lot and three more randomly placed buildings, one claimed as a used car lot, a barber shop that looks only partly in business, and a pawn shop, and on the other side a 1990’s strip mall with a collection of shops like the Dollar Tree and Popeyes Chicken. Across the street, construction fencing is surrounding not one but two multi acre sites with six cranes in the air. There is no usable sidewalk in sight but people are still walking down the street, confused.
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I am walking down the street, I have just left a brand new complex that has been recently rebranded. It appears to be an old factory of sorts in a seemingly “good” location, right on the water, perhaps for new up and coming industries. I see loads of vacant space next door just begging to be used, most likely reserved for a tech start up, but every inch of the space I am in is occupied as we weave up stairs and down small hallways. As I leave this revitalization dream, I pass parking lots full of cars that don’t appear to have been put there intentionally and am seeking a path to the nearest subway train to go back into the city. I walk past buildings with businesses I don’t recognize, check cashing places and beauty salons, all with some sort of handmade curtain that would resemble a bed sheet, and vinyl signage adhered to the glass.
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I walk down a street that I have been on many times before, but this time the street is completely different. The construction fencing and cranes that had been here for years are all gone and in their place parks a new museum, high end shops and urban trail. This space is now a playground for the uber rich and consumers seeking an up scale experience as an architectural wonderland with an escher-like spectacle that is blocked from public consumption due to the high rate of teenage suicides that have taken place there, apparently caused by the sculpture itself.
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The cities we live in are in constant change but all share the same DNA and life cycles, development and redevelopment. Gentrification, walkability, independent businesses are all things that define our urban cores along with the homeless under blankets behind any crevice out of sight. Our cities define our times, they are the places that unite us in crisis, where we march in the streets in mass messaging, they are the places where you can’t choose your neighbors, they are the places that allow us to express ourselves freely and snag whatever we want if we want it badly enough.
The Street View Collection: Urban Hellscape is evidence of those ephemeral moments that define our cities, the median meadow that appears only once a year transforming a previous civil engineering design element for traffic flow into a beautiful scene. The glimmer of light that reflects off the glassy buildings when the sun is just right, the moment when the city lights up as day turns into night, the odd spray painted messages that appear on the ground mysteriously a code that only the workers can read, and the street art that reclaims a vacant structure often times just for a short moment before a new tag appears.
Collection Prints: Urban Code, Hellscape, Median Meadow, Glimmer, City Glow, Grit, Open, Scribbles.