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Explorations concerning the impact of the automobile on culture and nature are crucial. Specifically, the focus is on the
relationship of urban planning and the geographic compression of natural resources or the dismantling of forests and extensive
environmental and cultural damage resulting from the ways in which humans build, shape and define communities. Parceling and
packaging refers to two key ideas: divisions of land defining the suburban structure of satellite communities or subdivisions,
strip malls and corporate office parks dispersed along strings of highways and interstate roadways and, as a metaphor for
the relationship of space and social interaction.
Networks of master subdivisions have created a car dependent population
and continues to encourage a lifestyle built on fragmentation, multiplicity and continuous consumption requiring more energy
to harness natural resources and, in so doing, polluting life sustaining elements and contributing to propelling social alienation.
Destruction of the land and forests, daily, to develop roads and to establish territory delineation is suffocating humanity.
It is like an open sore oozing noxious gas alienating us from nature and each other. Alienation from nature is far more obvious
than psychological and social alienation of cultures within the fabric of humanity. Planned communities, in essence, are about
economic issues. A reconstitution of land splits-off into a further fragmentation of human beings into autonomous territorial
enclaves sometimes by choice and sometimes due to clear divisions of class and race forming a hierarchy or ranking of population
members. This ranking or ordering is a mask for sources of oppression, exploitation and domination embedded deep into the
American individualist psyche.
The process of unmasking or exposing underlying ideas motivating urban planning and design
is a process built on the knowledge that the human built environment is an engineered construction built not only with bricks
and timber but clear ideas about the spatial order of social life. A redistribution of wealth and resources from the city
to the suburbs translates to issues about an individuals power redefining and restructuring the faces of labor. Who does what
where and what quality of life results is a factor in the way land is conceived and managed.
Most of us have witnessed
the demise of American City centers in the last 50 years and their recent resurgence. My work addresses this experience from
the point of personal interest and on a philosophical level because I have come to know that the way that we live is built
upon
the way that ideas permeate experience. The perception of downtown, suburbia is significant because it is a perception
of a thing that often determines a course of ideas and actions.
Thick layers of information, in todays post modern contemporary
world, form skins & blankets of hyper-reality extending deeply into the spatial fabric of daily life. Openness and flexibility
constitute the postmodern experience that which resists a single, all encompassing way of perceiving and knowing. A nomadic
or migratory behavior of humans constitutes the term hypermodern world where the individual, naturally, expects to experience
an overabundance of events and spaces. What this means is that in order to continue to participate in the modern world we
are engaged in constant development, expansion and colonization of places that will provide real and virtual experiences.
The contemporary world or post modern experience can be considered to be a de-centered subject shifting in a simulacra
of representations with theme park titles i.e. Esquire Towers, Sky View Estates, Cellular Shadows, Sparrows Trace, Whispering
Pines, The Sodded Hedges of South Square, Tall Tree or Hogs Hollow - all tucked into perfectly landscaped and fertilized designer
units. These are more like sugar cookies-equal parts sugar and fat!
As I experience and contemplate the sensibility
of space I roll, fold, peel, compress, and expand physical material testing the limitations of form through the impact of
speed, combustion and gravity. Tire marks, scorched and burned materials abraded by the impact of an automobile at high speed
with ripped and torn surfaces turned inside-out, burned and blasted configurations intercepted by a gelatinous skin-like substances
like Chitlins or lost epidermis and, photographic essays begin to represent the suburban condition. Individual rubber bundles,
compressed, folded paper parcels; some with canvas and wool blankets, wrapped in wires like packages, clinging to a wall translate
to ideas about segregation, geographic delineation, separation and social engineering. The colonization of the human race
in terms of class structure, rich/poor, exclusive enclaves and those who live under a bridge is based on the memory and concept
of manifest destiny or the continuous strive toward the development of autonomous sub-groups based on economic power and influence,
desperately trying to escape mass misery. The blue light (sky) may burn out. The power may cease. Worse yet, the cul-de-sac
may flood with the sewage of the neighbors as we busily try to grasp the relationship of life and environmental design in
association with nature.
copyright 1998
Caroleigh Robinson
Exhibition Statement
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