Premise:
Urban Exquis is inspired both by the cadavre exquis method of poetry, in which a collection of writers blindly contribute isolated words that together compose a poem, and by Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1976 film City Slivers, in which the artist depicts New York City through a collection of masked views that fill only a portion of the film frame. Urban Exquis consists of twenty-four short videos that depict various urban environments. Like the word fragments in a cadaver exquis, each video is composed by a different moviemaker, artist, or architect. Like the images in City Slivers, each video is a vertically-oriented fragment of a conventional video frame that defies the conventional widescreen format of cinema. In both method and form, the installation challenges many assumptions regarding the relevance of cinematic imagery to urban space. Urban Exquis suggests that the identity of the city resides in simultaneity and adjacency, not in spatial and temporal unity. Like the city itself, it cannot be understood as a singular vision. It is fragmentary, elusive, frustrating, and (ultimately) beautiful in a way that eludes intention.
Ciotat Studio is an interdisciplinary design and research practice based in New York City. Its work includes examples of architectural and urban design, moviemaking, drawing, and writing. www.ciotatstudio.com
First Street Green (FSG) is a group of community artists, architects and residents that came together in 2008 to revitalize the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) – owned vacant lot at 33 East First Street in Manhattan into a maintainable plaza and cultural space Art Park. First Street Green’s phase 1 goal has been achieved through DPR’s effort and hosting of the BMW Guggenheim Lab in 2011. FSG’s new challenge in the 2nd phase of its mission is to support the new Art Park by working with the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, and use First Park Art Park to host sustainable programming for and with the community focusing on cultural and educational events involving all of the arts, while also serving as a public forum for ideas. firststreetgreenpark.org
