Tag: gaia

This new series is entitled Legacy and it is a very basic attempt to reinscribe the figures who have shaped our landscape back onto the surface of their legacy, the infrastructure and policies that we have inherited and must navigate.

Robert Moses was commissioned by the city of Baltimore to oversee the planning of the Franklin St expressway, otherwise known as Route 40, which passes through the primarily black West Baltimore. The quote reads “… Some of the slum areas through which the Franklin Expressway passes are a disgrace to the community, and the more of them that are wiped out the healthier Baltimore will be in the long run” 1944 www.uctc.net/papers/659.pdf

The quote reads:“Flight of the medium and upper income families from the city limits and the replacement by persons of both races of the lowest income levels is a threat not only to our municipal solvency but to the economic stability of the entire metropolitan area,” James Wilson Rouse (April 26, 1914 – April 9, 1996), founder of The Rouse Company, was a pioneering American real estate developer, urban planner, civic activist, and later, free enterprise-based philanthropist.

Photos by Gaia

Living Walls Wrapup from Gaia Uroboros on Vimeo.

So Now that everything has settled down and I am back in New York, it’s time to sit down and adequately give an overview of the street, gallery and legal works produced for the Living Walls Conference. The focus of these works was a hybridization of the Cherokee and Suburbia, both entities that occupy the American imagination but are seemingly different. The photo references employed within these portraits are women of the Cherokee nation, which was one of the first Native American tribes to embrace the encroaching Western frontier. These photographs capture a people in transition who retain their traditional values while simultaneously assimilating to a new, oppressive lifestyle. In the largest of the four street pieces, the Cherokee weaving pattern transitions into the homogeneity of suburban sprawl, an issue that has defined Atlanta’s contemporary development. The romance of establishing autonomy closer to nature, away from the turmoil of the city, is joined with the domesticity of the Cherokee portraits, the romantically free people tamed by invasion. A more comprehensive overview of the other projects will be coming soon! More photos and details after the jump

Continue reading “Living Walls Wrap Up”

Gaia in Korea: the second of five pieces for each quadrant of the city. With the wave of evangelicalism that has arrived with the western wash that has suffused korea for the last half century, I thought it would be pertinent to hybridize/subvert the old tradition with the new influence. Shamanism and Buddhism were expelled from the city of seoul when the Joseon dynasty adopted Confucianism and now the country is undergoing a new religious transition to Christianity. But the Image of Buddhism has returned to the the walls of the palace right near the ancient gate of Gyeongbokgung, this time by the hands of a westerner. The contrast of the Buddhist monk with praying hands inscribed with the symbols of the disciple St Andrew is a portrait of passing times and transmission of culture.

This piece was literally put up a block away from the main gate in the thick of the national security of one of the most geopolitcally tenuous nations in Asia. Yet somehow a foreigner is always invisible.