Years ago, I’d hurtle home each evening on the 39 bus to Jamaica Plain. Bending onto South Huntington and passing the start-and-stop E-train trolley, we’d bypass traffic cones and cement barriers, construction-in-pause, sunk in a “wintry mix.” I would peer out the window onto the memorable street lit scene. Even before (and certainly ever since) those daily commutes, such construction and curbside traffic cones would consistently snag my attention.
Across the dull cityscape – upon concrete, asphalt, and bulldozer-overturned dirt – they would stick out like brightly painted brushstrokes; they are like graphic diagrams, three-dimensional yield signs. They seek to foretell of hazardous goings-on, sentinels that presage ambiguously, silently, at roadside.
This is their job, of course, but in the bustle of daily life, few really consider these meanings. For me, what they communicate spills over into the existential. I am attracted to these orange elements of construction, as well as plastic containers, instructional traffic lights, signs, and road markings, and lush green bursts of plant life. These have built themselves into an internal set of archetypes whose symbolic meanings I am in the process of discerning. And when these symbols begin to interact with one another, creeping into each other’s space, overlapping and confronting the natural world, their layered messages become particularly complicated, exciting, and striking.
This is work completed in 2007. This is an emerging landscape.