Billboard space
At the end of June I was invited to install some poster work on Exeter Phoenix’s billboard space. This space is a relatively recent introduction the phoenix’s gallery spaces & serves to allow artists to install work over the top of previous work, slowly building up layers. This space isn’t too precious & the excitement comes from the layers & play between each artists work.
While placing my work I enjoyed looking for small moments that could begin a dialogue. Interestingly my architectural images were overlaying a map work. The importance of the images I chose & their location with regards to their historical fate seems enhanced by the map beneath.
The buildings featured in these posters are Burj El Murr in Beirut and Pruitt Igoe in St Louis, USA. One stands empty having never been inhabited, stranded in the city since civil war broke out. The other publicly and very famously destroyed, ultimately blamed on its inhabitants. These two monuments of failed modern architecture are kin having been fated in similar circumstances.
The images have been embellished with risograph template ink and highlighter pen in an attempt to showcase some of the drama exposed in the mutability and stasis that the images show.
My fascination with Pruitt Igoe is two fold in that its life span is a wild tale in housing politics involving race & class. Then its massive scale public demolition, seemingly this place was doomed from the outset, hindsight gives us that. The development was so large & with my use of highlighter pens I try to make the viewer think of an individual block, maybe an individual home or even person out of thousands. The famous images of this place being raised to the ground also accompany this wall collage, showing the viewer the end of Pruitt Igoe’s story. A story that is in contrast to that of the other building shown on this wall, Burj El Murr.
This 40 storey building in Beirut was made in the mid 70’s around the time Pruitt Igoe was failing & being demolished. Unlike the housing estate in America this skyscraper was never complete, no-one ever moved into the offices, still to this day & it was never demolished. It stands empty on the skyline, a relic of the history of the city. As civil war broke out in Lebanon this building became a strategic sniper post rather than the place of business that it was intended to be. Those windows, which make up the image I have postered became a deadly view on the world. In recent years the building was once again taken over, this time by artists Jad el Khoury, who installed colourful canopies in each window. As the wind blew through the tall shell of concrete, the colourful materials billow out bringing a new context to those windows.
Keeping in line with a poster work that I made years ago, drama within architecture seems to have taken root in this part of my practice. The work I made before was of the partially collapsed Ronan court in London. A gas explosion caused a partial collapse on the corner of a block of flats, highlighting the poor design & build quality of many buildings made at that time. A lesson you would hope has been resolved over time when it comes to tall building safety, but still, in recent years we have seen that sadly not. 💚
All of these architectural stories play out the age old tales of class inequality, war & spectacle. Not a theme that I intended to pursue but is so intertwined in the images that grip me that its hard to ignore.
