A PAPER AND CARDBOARD UTOPIA A detail
of the collaborative city. |
In the back of Stairwell Gallery, a mini-metropolis of paper and cardboard has taken shape over the past week and a half. “Magic City Repairs” is the brainchild of Andrew Oesch and Jean Cozzens, a pair of Providence artists in the second-half of their 20s with the big idea that by inviting all comers to lend a hand cutting and pasting together a toy city they can help people feel that maybe, just maybe, they can have some say in the future of their world.
“We’re modeling a way we want to exist in the world,” Oesch tells me, “which is this subtle democratic vision.”
“That order and organization don’t have to come from above,” Cozzens adds. “It can be mutually created and shared.”
The installation is a work-in-progress that began with a waffles and glue-gun brunch-art-happening on May 27. Oesch and Cozens provided the raw materials, including paper screenprinted with patterns resembling bricks and wood planks. Some 90 people provided the labor. They created jaunty little towers and charming chimneys, a drawbridge, windmill, skateboard halfpipe, and a round domed churchy building. A scraggly tree sprouts inside what looks to be a broken-down mill building. It’s a paper and paste fairy wonderland. Drop by the gallery and add your own building — or join the crowd at an art-making party there on Thursday, June 14 from 11 am to 8 pm, with potluck dinner around 6.
Cozzens studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her art of late tends to be in an architectural mode. Last year, Cozzens was invited by Ann Schattle, the children’s librarian at the Fox Point Public Library, to organize a project. Cozzens came up with “New Your City,” which invited kids to build a city of cardboard, paper cups, styrofoam, and tinfoil. It was such a crowd-pleaser that Cozzens created a second “New Your City” with kids at the Fox Point branch in March.
Reassembled at the Providence Public Safety Complex at 325 Washington Street (through June 11), it’s a crazy cardboard urban fantasy strung with necklaces of elevated highways and train tracks. Landmarks include “The Museum of Unnatural History,” “Hex the ExComputer Company,” and “The Leaning Chimney of New Your City” (a crooked cardboard tube stuck atop a box). It becomes quickly apparent that “Magic City” is a sequel for grown-ups.
Over in Olneyville Square at the Dirt Palace, the feminist art co-operative where Cozzens lived for a couple of years, she and Oesch have erected a third cardboard city in the building’s storefront window (through June 17). This one, which they created by their lonesome, features cut and painted cardboard towers and mill buildings, and bubble-wrap clouds. Free-floating word balloons say: “I’m tired, I’m headed for bed,” “I miss you,” “His job,” “My wife,” and “How much will that cost?”
The differences between the three cardboard sister cities aren’t substantial. They all seem to stem from the traditional kids’ pastime of drawing worlds or building cities out of dolls and toys. The use of materials is probably most inventive in the “New Your City” kids project, which features things like egg-carton trains. The Stairwell Gallery installation is distinguished by cut-up and collaged screenprints, which has become a signature Providence technique. All three installations radiate verve and fun, which is an accomplishment, but I wish the ideas the duo is scratching at — ideas about how to get people engaged with the direction of their community — were more embodied in the end products.
At Stairwell Gallery, the cardboard city is augmented by Cozzens’s master images for screenprints encouraging people to “Fight to Save Eagle Square” and oppose “speculative development” in Olneyville. And Cozzens displays architectural sketches of the floor plan and cross-section of the triple-decker she lives in that map not just the walls and doors, but furnishings and memories — “my bike got stolen off the porch a long time ago,” the crooked landing, “this table was the only piece of furniture that still exists from Emily’s childhood home,” a dead plant, “fixed the oven door handle but nobody noticed.” Cozzens, on her own and with Oesch, is still figuring out the formats, but she has intriguing questions about people and their relationships with their places.
