2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageAre You Here?
Friday, October 28 - 2:00PM to 2:45PM
My lecture will focus on my use of social engagement and public art within my practice.
Example 1:
My most recent project was titled, Are You Here? , consists of a white background with black text reading, “Are You Here?” This
question, which references the phrase “You Are Here” often found on highway rest area maps, is meant to engage passersby on multiple levels. Other than a literal statement regarding geography, the phrase “Are You Here?” is also a metaphysical question meant to encourage motorists to be more fully present and mindful of their experience at the particular moment they encountered the message. Photographs and videos of the billboards have been exhibited at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont (2016) and at Gallery Kayafas in Boston (2016). Each show also featured free newsprint posters of the “Are You Here?” text that visitors could take home, expanding the project beyond the museum and billboard contexts. In 2016 I was commissioned by the deCordova Museum to create a site-specific installation on the grounds of their sculpture park. The finished piece consists of a 10’ x 20’ “Are You Here?” billboard. It will remain installed until September 2017.
Example 2:
In 2006 I was commissioned by the City of Chicago and the Chicago Transit Authority to create a permanent public artwork in the newly renovated Armitage Avenue elevated train station. The source material for this piece was a series of interviews that I conducted on the platform of the old station in 2007, several months before it closed for renovation. I asked commuters to tell me a meaningful story from their lives in Chicago and subsequently made a photograph of each story’s locale. The finished piece is titled Chicago El Stories and consists of 42 20” x 24” photographs paired with quotes from the interviews, each mounted behind a glass tile, creating a 10 by 45 foot wall directly across from the turnstiles at the entrance of the station. This wall is a permanent part of the subway station and has an estimated lifespan of 100 years. Additionally, the photographs as well as the original audio recordings, can be viewed and listened to at a website I designed for this project, www.chicagoelstories.com.
speaker
Jonathan Gitelson
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