Revivival, 2020, Custom printed fabric, 25 x 12 feet, Sara Jimenez + Jason Schwartz
In Revivival, I collaborated with writer/activist Jason Schwartz to create three fabric triangular banners at Pelham Art Center. The banners are composed of manipulated photos taken of the nearby coastline of Pelham Bay. The layout and geometry of each triangle refer to the pitched gables of Tudor Revival architecture that pervade the Village of Pelham and surrounding suburbs. The inverted gables of the piece point upwards, toward the sky.
We explored the architecture and landscape of the region around Pelham, and were drawn to locations where the material of human habitation interacted with natural processes. For example, where remnants of old bricks, smooth sea glass, and ceramic fragments mix with shells and rocks on the coastline of Pelham Bay. This blurring of boundaries via the shared presence of remnants of natural phenomena and human histories is a core inspiration for the piece.
We have also been drawn to the stucco and stone facades, half-timbered framing, and pitched gables of Tudor Revival architecture. The style gestures to a quaint, imagined history of aristocratic country life, far from the industrialized bustle of modern America. It is a fiction imposed on the landscape, meant to entice homebuyers at early surges of the American suburbs.
Instead of the austere colors and plain faces of Tudor Revival gables, which are themselves purely decorative, the surfaces of these triangles are made up of abstracted images pulled from natural features of the landscape of Pelham Bay: rock faces, beach mud, meadows, and the bay itself. We are interested in interrogating and troubling constructed histories.