Contemporary Ruin future visions
Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel
3401 Filbert St.
Philadelphia
Showing through May 22
Seen May 10
Cities, like the people who reside in them, are always works in progress. Governments change, zoning codes tweak, disrepair and development trade places.
In her mosaic landscapes of West Philadelphia, artist Jennifer Johnson captures the motion of neighborhood evolution. Her work is part of a broader exhibit at Drexel University’s Pearlstein Gallery called “Contemporary Ruin future visions.”
The show — which “highlights ruin, not as a relic of the past but as a present-day reality” — examines the modern day architectural destruction of Philadelphia. There are dramatic photos preserving the ghostly scenery of Philly’s abandoned institutions, like the half-demolished Saint Bonaventure Roman Catholic Church on North 9th Street or the empty aisles of the defunct 1950s Penn Fruit supermarket on Frankford Avenue. There are realistic gouache portraits of construction taking place in the highly gentrified Fishtown neighborhood. There is a diorama of a warehouse in North Philadelphia reimagined with wildflowers growing out of the roof beside digital prints of an imagined, futuristic Philadelphia called “Scrapton” where small huts full of bartering civilians betray a backdrop of crumbling glass skyscrapers.
Johnson’s mosaics of Lancaster Avenue and 34th Street in West are probably the least literal works on display. They are also the most lively and profound.
West Philadelphia, which prior to 1805 was accessible from the city only by ferry, has endured mass alterations over the last century. Before the 1960s, when urban renewal led by higher education and medical institutions created “University City,” the area between 40th and 32nd streets was known as “Black Bottom.” Check out this article about an archaeological dig into a cultural graveyard of roughly 5,000 displaced Black residents.
Johnson’s mosaics show West Philadelphia as it exists today: Colorful row homes, urban gardens, increasingly large housing and office complexes. But the materials used to construct the bustling scenes of buildings allude to the past; she tells her neighborhood’s story in shards, fitting together broken pieces of ceramic to illustrate the janky form of gentrification. Rather than literal, her creative approach is functional; Johnson translates a bulldozed past into an image of spirited albeit imperfect and at times askew resilience.
Mosaic was often used as a way of decorating building interiors, like floors and walls, in past civilizations such as Ancient Rome. It struck me as subversive that Johnson would use the technique to instead encapsulate street facades, detailing the sometimes dingy, sometimes gorgeous architecture of West Philly. The project turns the idea of “ancient ruins” on its head.
My own apartment in West Philadelphia, built in 1930, sometimes feels like an active ruin. The landlord performs little upkeep; the front porch has fallen off the face of the place right next to us. Down the street is a massive, shiny complex of luxury apartments that only further emphasizes our home’s antiquation.
Johnson’s art suggests radical acceptance for this reality: “While this handful of blocks in Philadelphia is the place I know best,” she writes of Lancaster and 34th, “I still see something new everyday.”
