黑料不打烊

Walter Benjamin, in The Arcades Project, describes the difference between 鈥淭race鈥� and 鈥淎ura鈥�. Benjamin says that Trace is 鈥溾��the appearance of nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.鈥� (-Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, transl. by Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 447) My recent works feature the landscapes of both the Brooklyn waterfront and Provincetown and Truro, MA. In each instance, and in spite of the obvious polarity between industry and pristine ocean-front, Absence is my muse.Benjamin asks us to consider what remains figuratively and literally, psychically and physically when some thing which was, ceases to be? Red Hook, Brooklyn, a former longshoring and industrial waterfront neighborhood, is changing (largely due to the booming real estate market in New York City); its transformation made visibly manifest through the abandonment and/or the re-development of industrial architecture. The dunes and shacks of the Outer Cape are too in a state of perpetual transformation: the wind and the elements shifting the sand dunes subtly. The architecture is eventually swallowed up, consumed, by Nature鈥檚 elements. Yet Benjamin suggests that there is something constant and perpetual that may be left behind as witness 鈥� as 鈥渁ura鈥�. Difficult to define, ineluctable, illusive, yet omni-present, the remains of architecture 鈥� whether industrial and rendered obsolete by the real estate developer鈥檚 quest or vernacular shacks made from driftwood and detritus subsumed by the wind carried sands, are for me, haunting and compelling.