people, places, things
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Urban Birds

 

Urban Birds

An allegory of the last hundred years of urban industry, Urban Birds (1989-93) was a hundred-sixty outlines on the walls of a 54,000 square-foot derelict brewery in the East Falls neighborhood of Philadelphia. The birds frame residues and invoke stories like ghosts, and are framed in turn by the massively structured rooms meant for brewing, lagering and bottling. Visiting the work required "watching" for birds in the almost overwhelming and chaotic physical condition of the site. See HERE for the sketches that generated this work.

 
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The bird images, a hundred and sixty drawings in twenty rooms, became frames for the story of the building itself, the line, composition and scale of the drawings responding to particular manufacturing uses for each room, to the structure, materials and details of the building as well as to its post-manufacturing uses as a clandestine, illegal retreat for kids in a socially disintegrating neighborhood.

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