Hadassah Aristide
Times Square in My Room
Prompt: Inspired by Andre Aciman's "Shadow Cities" piece, the Bridge #4 project borrows the idea of a 'shadow city', combining research sites in New York City and a place from the past to create a transformed setting that is personalized due to personal history, movement, and perspective.
Integrative Studio
Integrative Seminar
My ‘Shadow Cities’ project explores the relationship between my bedroom in Miami and Times Square. With themes of childhood and dreams prevalent in the piece, I focused on imagery of Times Square that I have seen in movies, television shows, or musicals that are emblematic of my childhood idealization of Times Square. In the content that I indulged in as a child, Times Square was depicted as a fantastical place, a symbol of hope that anyone who came there would have the opportunity to live out their dreams. Times Square was a place of action and movement; where dreams came to life, and so I wished to capture this quality of an excitable movement that I think is prevalent in Times Square, using not only movie and television imagery but also the images of objects seen in Times square that remind me of my bedroom. In this work, I wanted to capture Times Square, a playground of hopes and dreams within my bedroom, in which various depictions of myself are captured in the place of the protagonist of various movies and television shows like that of Devil Wears Prada and Enchanted. This piece came to fruition as a painted cardboard three- dimensional pop-up piece in which the various versions of myself are placed within the Times Square environment on the ground, but are revealed to be within the room as the back surface of the piece is decorated with childhood photographs and cards. To serve the idea of motion, I made cardboard automatons, making gears and playing with their orientation to get a certain movement.