Neighbor, 2024
Screenprint on Cotton
4’ x 24’
All photos courtesy of The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Photo: Carlos Avendaño
During winter/spring 2023, I documented a series of “ghost walls" around Philadelphia. Here, the private spaces of bedrooms, livingrooms, stairwells, kitchens, closets had all been laid bare to the elements and to passersby. They called for a moment of pause, an absence, in the dense architecture and developments of the city. These walls serve as questions: who was here? where have they gone? at what cost and at whose hand? And who arrives next?
During winter 2024, as I returned to Philly temporarily, there were even more gray condos flattening old rowhomes and the University City townhomes were torn down. Ubiquitous orange construction fencing was wrapped throughout the city. As a barely effective barrier, I was drawn to its permeable form and the way that it both framed a landscape and tried to limit access to it. I sat with this imagery and with the question of what it means to be a neighbor.
