223-225 West 10th Street – New York, New York
April 10, 2015 – May 23, 2015
Battery Park is the latest work in Stojakovic’s Urban Wild series, an ongoing hybrid project that merges vertical gardens, painting, and sculpture. The work is an imagined and abstracted map of a future Lower Manhattan that has been modified by radical environmental change and human attempts to respond to those changes. The title, Battery Park, references both the park of the same name, once an artillery battery to protect early settlements, and the architectural renderings for ‘Super Storm Barriers’ featuring dense new plant life that came in the wake of Super Storm Sandy. These ambitious and forward-looking renderings typically incorporate a natural plant barrier around Lower Manhattan to serve as a defense system against further environmental incursion. In this work, Stojakovic looks to the cyclical nature of this phenomenon: development destroyed the original natural barriers that protected our shores from flooding and now we must artificially rebuild them. Rather than stand in critical opposition to the city, developers, or utopian landscape architects, the artist draws attention to the fragility of our position; his succulents will thrive in the arid West 10th Window, but they would succumb quickly in a flooded landscape.
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The West 10th Street Window is curated by Natalie Diaz and Jennie Lamensdorf and is sponsored by the Time Equities Inc. (TEI) Art-in-Buildings Program. TEI is committed to enriching the experience of our properties through the Art-in-Buildings Program, an innovative approach that brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces in the interest of promoting artists, expanding the audience for art, and creating a more interesting environment for our building occupants, residents, and their guests.
