toilet paper tubes, polyurethane, hair, leather, acrylic paint, jar, caulk
A friend told me that the bricks used to
build most of Chicago around the turn of century were softer, fired in
kilns to a lower core temperature. The city’s older, soft-bricked
buildings have been repaired with mortar intended for the newer, harder
bricks, leading to the cracks and buckling that are as critical to the
city’s architectural landscape as the bricks themselves. The overgrown
lots reclaiming bricks from 1893 and 1963 into the soil and the
cinderblock condo buildings built at the peak of the housing bubble with
sheets of artificial brick sealed onto their facades and already
crumbling are also critical to that landscape, how we read it and relate
to it.
My intimacy with the city and its landscape
is the same intimacy I share with friends and lovers— emotional
commitment lacing into ideological critique, history into fantasy,
structural material into garbage. This pair of objects embodies that
intimacy and provides a tool for seeing and building these
relationships.
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