Alienation, pt. 1
Last Friday, I was walking home from the Four Seasons Hotel on Logan Square, where I'd met up with one of my collectors and a few of her friends who were there to see my paintings that are on exhibit in the Fountain Restaurant. It was early evening and the city was going through the last bits of the changeover from the work week into the party spirit of the weekend.
I walked south on 18th and had to wait for the light at Market Street. Looking east and west along Market, I realized that there were a lot of names and even looks of buildings that I didn't recognize. Then, I thought about some of the places that I remember being in the area, mostly the movie theaters that used to be on Market between 16th and 18th. Thinking about that and all of the changes that have taken place in the city in terms of recent real estate developments and change of demographics in a lot of neighborhoods over the past 15 years and realizing how long I've lived here, coupled with an upcoming milestone birthday had me feeling not nostalgic for the good/bad old days of Philly, but rather a numbing sense of alienation. An alienation that left me feeling like I had no place here any more.
It sounds melodramatic, but that feeling was incredibly overwhelming and saddening. Things change, they have to. I advocate being open to change when I speak to art students about their work and it's something that is a big part of my own art practice. Cities evolve as life does because cities are composed of human beings as well as nature and structures (buildings) and over time, the needs of people change, so it follows that our surroundings will change, as well. In that moment the other night, at 18th and Market, I think that I truly understood what some older people feel when it seems the world has changed over night and they no longer recognize the place that they've called home for so long and suddenly feel like they don't belong any more.
I walked south on 18th and had to wait for the light at Market Street. Looking east and west along Market, I realized that there were a lot of names and even looks of buildings that I didn't recognize. Then, I thought about some of the places that I remember being in the area, mostly the movie theaters that used to be on Market between 16th and 18th. Thinking about that and all of the changes that have taken place in the city in terms of recent real estate developments and change of demographics in a lot of neighborhoods over the past 15 years and realizing how long I've lived here, coupled with an upcoming milestone birthday had me feeling not nostalgic for the good/bad old days of Philly, but rather a numbing sense of alienation. An alienation that left me feeling like I had no place here any more.
It sounds melodramatic, but that feeling was incredibly overwhelming and saddening. Things change, they have to. I advocate being open to change when I speak to art students about their work and it's something that is a big part of my own art practice. Cities evolve as life does because cities are composed of human beings as well as nature and structures (buildings) and over time, the needs of people change, so it follows that our surroundings will change, as well. In that moment the other night, at 18th and Market, I think that I truly understood what some older people feel when it seems the world has changed over night and they no longer recognize the place that they've called home for so long and suddenly feel like they don't belong any more.