Look Both Ways
The work seen here represents one week of observing everyday occurrences in the D.C. area. I have only been to the area once before, a long time ago, on a high school trip. When I first arrived at Anaba Project Space, Akemi took me through downtown D.C., to the Mall and the White House. What I noticed first was that there were many tourists. Their outfits, cameras and picture taking tools. Tourists are funny cause they want to capture a moment, but in doing so, they rarely experience that moment outside of a quick documentation on their cameras and smartphones. Before cameras the only way to capture a memory from sightseeing was to sit and sketch it. How did we go from looking at something so intently as to replicate it by hand, and in the moment, to looking at it through the quick and disposable mediation of a small screen?
In the same way, crossing the street out in front of Anaba Project Space presents similar problems. Crossing here where there is no sidewalk puts one at the mercy of the quick blind sighted drivers. Walking versus driving in the suburbs can be a fight especially with drivers looking through their smartphones rather than the road. This behavior is not kind to the slower pedestrian. I wanted to bring light to this topic in a humorous way that inserted a wearable solution into this suburban environment.
The other Paper-helmets and wearables here are thanks to the Bethesda party store, a source of inspiration. They are sketches for future projects that might be wearables for types of tourists, indicating their worldview stereotype. The “Canadian Collar” keeping an upright viewpoint and the “American Flag¬”–a sharp jumble that obscures other viewpoints. It is my desire to keep working on these and perform them in the future.