Beneath the networked design of Robert Moses’ Prospect/Gowanus expressway are triangles—public pieces of land created by two streets decussating before merging onto highway systems. Triangle three-sixteen, located steps away from La Kaje, is one such plot. These pieces of land cannot easily fit into imaginaries of public spaces nor private ones. They are supplementary areas in urban design making use of every square inch of a city expanse. While they uncomfortably attempt to bare their nomination as parks, they are too small, too dusty, and in the most polluted intersections of the city.
Leona, Leone stages an infrastructural dedication to six invented characters in the form of a park bench. While defined by total isolation (loneliness), the exhibition speaks to a desire for infinite interconnectedness, mirroring familiar technocratic models. The bench, and its poetic dedication to this imagined public, is a proposal for a public object in a world on the brink of collapse, within a city whose infrastructure projects manage the anxieties of an unpredictable future. It stands as a concrete interruption in the shared material of what it means to be facing collective indeterminacy.
The collaboration between Fremderman and Lamargese realizes a place to process the potential to never fully relate to one another. It invites the social bargaining at play between people, insofar as our desire to live publicly is altered by the (un)certainties we face as private persons. The gaps that open as we shift between the individual and the collective are here filled by a new language and set of objects that the artists offer back to us, free of charge.
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