Archive for April 3rd, 2008
Guest (2003)
Guest, “My Green Home” (Group Show), Winter Palace, Staten Island, New York. (2003)
Within walking distance of the site I performed on, is the Winter Palace (an artspace on Staten Island). In April 2003, I staged “Guest” in a nearby abandoned lot. I packed duct tape and rope and built a “guest room” out of the trash I found on the site. Christopher Cardinale, Brendan Fitzgerald, and James Vicente were instrumental in helping me explore the site, photograph its remains, build the structure, and set up the documentation.
Stolen cars are secreted to this abandoned stretch of land in Staten Island, stripped and torched. Resting on the ground beside many of the burnt cars are clean, new baby car seats; they have been removed but not taken.
I always visited this site in the middle of the day. Sunlight, bird song and budding trees did not dissolve the sensation that I was not wanted here and that this was not mine. Occasionally, a lone grown man would walk through, but invariably, he, too, looked wary- trying to watch his very own back. I had expected to run across children in the lot- as I had often found myself in overgrown thickets and trash heaps when I was a child. But I was told that children don’t come here. Everyone in the neighborhood basically stays away, including the people that have nowhere else to go; they circulate around its perimeter.
