Parallel sidewalks border a road flowing towards a turning point at the end of a narrow street, congested with cars looking for diverse cuisines on either side. Aimed at the same general direction is the elevated path of the LIRR. Riders and pedestrians criss-cross to and from the same points within their bounded paths, while simultaneously creating shifting boundaries for cars and for each other. Repetitive sounds of train tracks, car engines, station announcements are interrupted by occasional street chatter and loud heels on the cement and cobblestone pavement. The point of convergence seems to be beyond a brand-new development called “NEW WORLD MALL”. This narrow street is not ready for more people as cars and pedestrians barely navigate past each other now without brushing, but relentless commercial development projects are slated for the coming years. The interactions between paths are slated to become chaotic, overrun by traffic, not only at the intersection of Prince Street and 40th Rd, but throughout this lovely little town called Flushing.
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Moving from the bottom up towards the right, a gradual increase in darkness and openness can be seen. The congestion of cars and pedestrians is most extreme in the large plate, where there is hardly any white space left and the leaves imprinted by soft ground overlap and touch each other, as well as the boundaries set by the pedestrians criss-crossing on sidewalks. The paths of people constantly jay-walking across the congested streets is shown by the splotchy flows of sugar-lift, increasingly sporadic and heavily-used as the restricting dominance of cars decreases though there’s always a residue of sounds and soot. The resulting plates were not what I had in mind really; every iteration brought unexpected prints with varying lights and darks due to experimenting with pressures and etching times as well as mixing up plate placements. It was really a process of seeing how different methods of etching interacted over iterations and since my original goal was to show interactions of paths and boundaries, with people meandering like water through the streets, there was lots of uncertainty in what results would come of these many interactions. Overall, I’m satisfied with the final plates and prints (but I’ll probably layer on more outside of class to experiment more with sugar lift and aquatint).
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