Global Cities 2009-2013
Global Cities
The society that these paintings depict is less a society of spectacle, and more a world of superimposition, the result of intensified speed and motion.
I am implicated directly in this system, and have visited and photographed all the buildings of these composite cities. Their coincidence in my paintings defies conventional political or geographic boundaries that are often constructed between the developed world and emergent economies. These are global cities, still unique urban ecologies (not yet universalized), interlinked in survival.
Everywhere, suburbs meld together, historic or indigenous buildings are redeveloped, and ubiquitous construction techniques make one location look like another. International flights that routinely permit us to cross borders with ease now link countries and cultures in a nomadic network. My paintings attempt to visualize this contemporary amalgam of places, cultures and histories through an examination of travel, and issues of globalization, urban development, homogeneity and difference.
The more connected and integrated a global system grows, the more its networks replicate and lengthen, the less resilient it becomes. As in any ecosystem, change in one part affects other parts of the environment. We coexist in these intertwined environmental economies within subjective frames of personal potential, and life still transpires, though interstitially in the intervals or segments available to it. These cities are collections of such exterior and interior spaces, of fractured private and public spaces, of empty architectures that echo with poignancy and invisible purpose.