Hardness is Not the Absence of Emotion

In “Hardness Is Not the Absence of Emotion” (2022) I created an installation made from abstracted, governmental buildings in NY and Manila, PH, that have histories of war and violence. All of the architectures referenced have been influenced by “The City Beautiful Movement,” an American urban-planning movement at the turn of the 20th century. The movement believed that beautiful design could inspire “moral and civic virtue,” and eliminate “social ills.” It heavily referenced architecture from Europe, particularly Beaux-Arts architecture. Beaux-Arts was seen as rational, symmetrical, and ordered. I combined Beaux-Arts architectures inspired by this movement from spaces in Manhattan and Manila that have histories of military presence, war, and migration. I took fragments of these architectures to create a layered archway that visitors can walk through and around. The installation’s form is primarily inspired by deconstructing The Dewy Arch, a temporary triumphal archway that was built in Madison Square after the Spanish-American War, when the Philippines became a colony of the US. The patterns on the various fabrics reference digitized abstracted architectures from other spaces with similar histories and design origins. The title of the piece, Hardness is Not the Absence of Emotion... references a quote from Sara Ahmed’s text “The Cultural Politics of Emotion,” where she unpacks the gendered and socialized assumptions around the hierarchy between thought/reason and emotion. This installation was on view at 125 Maiden Lane, as part of Art in Buildings.