From the press release:
The Great Richmond is a crowd-sourced public sculpture/interactive diagram that is a collaboration between sculptor Will Corwin and cartographer Neil Greenberg. Corwin and Greenberg have collaborated on a monumental game-based installation that invites participants to re-imagine Staten Island, and their own particular environment, as they might want it to be: by turns a return to a semi-mythological sylvan and pastoral utopia, a much more built-up urban metropolis—a continuation of Manhattan and Jersey City across the harbor, or, on a controversial note, a seceded Staten, a new city in the constellation of the Northeast Corridor.
This project is a natural extension of past work by the collaborators. Neil Greenberg works in between the disciplines of urban planning, transit implementation, and cartography. His project “Fake Omaha” invented a new American city and used this thought problem to design solutions to the very real concerns of existing cities. “Freshwater Railway” imagines a detailed, functioning transit system for Greenberg's native Detroit area. Will Corwin has created sculptures throughout the New York area, Asia, and Europe. If these pieces do not insist on direct interaction, they at least demand the viewer to consider their individual viewpoint as a key to understanding the artwork. His Clocktower Chessmatch utilized the rules of chess as performed live during a game by two Grandmasters, to re-conceive a large-scale sculpture.
For “The Great Richmond,” Corwin and Greenberg researched the history of Staten Island, explored its many neighborhoods and invented a set of pieces and a human-scale “playing board.” The images that inspire the pieces include Henry David Thoreau (once an inhabitant of S.I.), the island's world-famous reptile house, Bathtub Madonnas, the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, and the Staten Island Mall. Though not with a focus on winning or losing, the guidelines for activating the sculptures are geared to creating an accumulation of images and objects that acts both as a sculpture and a data set that can be plumbed for conclusions about the island’s inhabitants and its visitors.
*Installation photos courtesy of Will Corwin
The Great Richmond
Will Corwin and Neil Greenberg
through December 7th
The Staten Island Art's Culture Lounge
Located inside the Staten Island Ferry Terminal
Staten Island, New York 10301
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