Elizabeth Hamby

My work takes place in a complex space between the studio, the classroom, and the city. I work as an artist, an urbanist, an educator and a researcher exploring issues of proximity, density, rhythm and speed. I see the city as a palimpsest, and my work as archeology, sounding and ground-truthing. My practice is grounded in drawing as a way of excavating meaning and diagramming the set of forces at work in complex spatial situations.

Two essential questions provide the scaffolding for my work: What does the city look like? And what does looking at the city tell us about broader questions of space and time?

Cities are an approachable form of complexity. The people, buildings, infrastructure, systems of transportation and all of the spaces and places in between: different kinds of time and space exist simultaneously in the city. As urban areas become home to more and more people—each of them “builders…constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own” (Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City), new modes of examining these spaces are necessary in order to address the social, political, economic and cultural challenges they embody.

More than half of the world’s population are considered “urban dwellers,” but their experience is hardly unified. Consider the simultaneous phenomena of shrinking and sprawling cities. In the United States, cities such as Pittsburgh, Detroit, and St. Louis are developing master plans focused on concentrating redevelopment and infrastructure projects on smaller geographic areas—razing outlying neighborhoods and transforming them into recreation or open space. At the same time, cities along the Atlantic Corridor continue to sprawl toward one another, becoming what Louis Mumford called a “megalopolis.”

Furthermore, the urbanization of the virtual world: the collapse of space and time through instant communication and rapid transportation has

Introductiontransformed the idea of distance and proximity. The internet has literally globalized the concept of community--what is the cultural memory of a Facebook Group? The regions and neighborhoods of the internet are rich sites for investigating the contemporary experience of space and place.

Finally, the mode of representing space has been transformed by advances in geolocation technology. Turn-by-turn directions and GoogleMaps offer a hyperlocal cartography. Mary Spence, President of the British Geographic Society says, “Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history – not to mention Britain’s remarkable geography – at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day. We’re in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique; giving us a feel for a place even if we’ve never been there.”

Within this expanded notion of the city, complicated by shifting modes of representations and methods of noting space cartographically, I present my work here through a collection of text and images that address three interrelated projects: Si(gh)t(e) Plans attempts to develop a mode of representing the dynamics of change, conflict, and harmony that make up urban experience. Island/Archipelago explores the mutually constituative relationship between rural and urban space.Visual Percussion examines the symphonic quality of space and the layered rhythms that create meaning in urban life.

These three projects penetrate my essential questions longitudinally, creating a matrix of ideas about the notion of the urban, and the role of visual media.

Si(gh)t(e) Plans“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: the assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Si(gh)t(e) Plans are strategies for thinking-through-material to investigate the sense of the urban by mapping and modeling the dynamics of cities. They are maps and models that visualize the verbs of the metropolis and development: overlay, density, infill, and sprawl. Built directly on the wall with paper, tape, spraypaint and graphite, they are temporary notations or propositions rather than fixed objects.

Each Si(gh)t(e) Plan is only installed for a short period of time, but is made from a “toolbox” of shapes and objects that are repeated throughout the project--creating an ever-shifting, overlapping, ephemeral atlas similar to Marco Polo’s imagined cities Invisible Cities. Although they are neither utopian nor dystopian, the Si(gh)t(e) Plans seek to investigate the dynamics of urban life at the city-level, as well as at the level of the networked, constantly connected, cosmopolitan individual who is the producer of, and is produced by, these spaces.

Overlay, 2009Built directly on the wall over the course of one month.Paper, masking tape, aluminum tape, photocopies, staples. 10’ x 14’

Si(gh)t(e) Plan I, 2009Built directly on the wall over the period of one monthPaper, tape, staples. 47” x 30”

Untitled Construction, 2009Built directly on the wall over the course of one day.Paper, masking tape, aluminum tape, staples, spraypaint. 16” x 22”

Archipelago, 2009Paper, Map PinsDimensions Variable

Si(gh)t(e) Plan II, 2009Built directly on the wall over the course of three daysNewsprint, paper, graphite, tape, spray-paint, map pins. 24” x 22”

The City is the Product of Many BuildersDrawing from the work of participatory urban planner, James Rojas, and inspired by the quote from Kevin Lynch, “The city is the product of many builders, each of them constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own,” The City is the Product of Many Builders was a participatory project that took during Open Studios at the Vermont Studio Center in November, 2009.

Surrounded by the Si(gh)t(e) Plans, participants were invited to organize small wooden toys or mark out areas on a large table with colored tape. Participants created their own structures, or transformed the buildings of other participants to investigate the dynamics of urban change and development..

A complex model-city, as well as a community of builders playfully emerged in conversation with the Si(gh)t(e) Plans over the course of several hours from the participation of approximately 75 people.

“In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the study of cartography, succeeding generations came to judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome, and, not without irreverence, they abandoned it to the rigors of sun and rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar.”

Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science

Island/Archipelago is a project of topographical maps. These maps shape an imaginary landscape, noting its hills and valleys, and the way that cities penetrate rural areas. Like the Si(gh)t(e) Plans, these pieces are not representations of an existing place, but rather maps of the dynamics of space that take place at both the macro and the micro-level.

The construction of these pieces mirrors the development of a city: generations of architecture, geology and human history build up and fall apart in physical space, memory and layers of meaning.

Island/Archipelago

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Islands 1-3, 2007 Graph Paper, Vellum, Tape, Correction Tape, Graphite and Found Images. Each Island is approximately 20” x 30”

Islands (Pair), 2007 Each Island is approximately 20” 24”Graph Paper, Vellum, Tape, Correction Tape, Graphite and Found Images

Metropolis Part I 2007 Built directly on the wall over the course of one weekGraph Paper, Graphite, Tape,and Correction Tape 10’ x 12’

Metropolis Part II, 2008Built directly on the wall over the course of two weeksGraphite,charcoal, paper, tape, zip ties, 25’ x 14’

Visual Percussion

“First Visual impression (that I am surely going to have to rectify: Impression) very interesting for a modern artist, thousands of new forms of motion, arriving in a paroxysm, enormous surfaces with thousands of rectangular holes, stairways coming down in zigzags from the highest levels, in vertiginous movement: elevators, platforms, tunnels, numbers—56, 56, 56, 56, passing rapidly on the poles—56 station stop—brusquely, thousands of people in the opposite direction, gasping, multicolor lights, noises, thundering like this…”

Joaquin Torres Garcia (quoted in Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis)

The Visual Percussion project seeks to explore space through the rhythms of everyday life. Drawing on musical language and theory, through this project I look at the city as a symphony of incredible complexity. Videos, performances, visual scores and participatory projects observe existing rhythms, appropriating them and remixing them to create new rhythms and ways of being in the city.

Visual Percussion: Score, 2009Tape, Stickers, Spraypaint on Catalog9’ x 8 1/2’

Untitled Installation: UtahThis untitled installation was created in October 2008 in an abandoned mine in rural Utah in collaboration with the artists Pooneh Maghazehe, Jason Metcalf, Ryan Neely and Chris Purdie. Clusters of colored tape and foam shapes colonized the space, challenging the decaying industrial order.

Parachutes!This project took place during Bushwick Open Studios in Brooklyn in June 2009.

Participants were invited to create small artworks, attach them to small toy para-troopers and toss them off the roof of my studio building. At street level, visitors to the studio were greeted with an artwork and an invitation to create and toss their own parachute

Visual Percussion VideosI am currently developing a series of videos with composer Jay Vilnai.

Imagined as a “visual percussion section,” to be included in a small musical ensemble, these videos attempt to record and perform the rhythms of everyday life in the city as experienced walking down the street, looking out a window, or down from the top of a tall building. I am particularly drawn to images of light and shade and the rhythms of natural time as they play out in urban space.

The footage for these videos has been gathered over the last four years—small samples of urban rhythms. Now, I am working with Jay to compose it in relation to the rest of the ensemble, but also in a way that is sensible as an urban narrative.

My work stems from the desire to make sense of the different kinds of time and space that exist within and between places, particularly cities. When I was growing up, we moved every five years, and as an adult I have moved and traveled even more frequently. Among other places, I have lived in rural California, a small town in Switzerland, a post-industrial Midwestern city, the Philadelphia suburbs, and now New York City.

However, I am interested not only in representations and experiences of space and place as they are understood locally and phenomenologically but more broadly as epistemologies--specifically, as ways of exploring the expanded notion of urbanism that has accompanied the collapse of time and space by advances in technology and transportation, and shifts in the scale and character of established cities.

The complexity of physical and temporal patterns within as well as between different spaces require sufficiently complex, interdisciplinary questions. I have situated myself between the boundaries of established fields: geography, urban planning, sociology and architecture, and offer my work as art practice and research.

My studio practice is centered around creating modes of visual shorthand for investigating spatial questions--posing shapes and materials to one another in an intuitive and experimental way. Simultaneously, I have been working for a nonprofit urban planning firm in Manhattan--feeding me not only with a steady stream of maps and images of cities, but also a healthy dose of reality. Questions of density and scale have implications for real people in real places.

Boris Groys has called for contemporary artists to become “comrades of time,” however, I believe that cities offer a conceptual framework for investigating complexity in terms of both space and time. As an artist, an urbanist, an educator and a researcher, my goal in graduate study and beyond is to generate innovative strategies for working collaboratively across professional and institutional lines to address contemporary issues of space and place. I believe that the Master of Science in Visual Studies at MIT will equip me with better tools and processes to do my work in the broader global context.

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