This interactive, site-specific project is a comment on how we - constantly attached to mobile devices - neglect to observe the environment around us. Like ostriches, we willingly trap our heads, minds, and imagination in a fantasy world that is detached from reality.
Three colorful fabric tunnels span a man-made grove of Elm trees in downtown Boston, defining an intimate courtyard where nature clashes with cartoonish representation.
Alzayer put cages around Boston's "Make Way for Ducklngs" statues, separating the baby duckling statues from the mother. The original statues were created in 1987 by Nancy Schon and the mallard family is based on the children's book by Robert McCloskey.
The internet has reshaped the ways we learn and communicate. Information becomes heuristic, concomitantly - knowledge becomes protean. If you dedicate enough time to any particular platform, you are likely to acquire a community with congenial individuals. Social media’s proliferation has obfuscated the lines between reality and fiction. Embraced as a tool for many, these digital spaces typically have no monitoring process.
In early 2012, a group of artists, activists and assorted other odd balls got together to form People's Tours. The idea was to give walking tours in the Boston area. Standard enough. But instead of the usual history, we would talk about social justice, contested spaces, important protests, and shady corporations.
So far, the group has consisted of Dave Taber, Heather McCann, Kristin Parker, Neil Horsky, and Tim Devin.
Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) was founded by Iraq war veterans in July 2004 at the annual convention of Veterans for Peace (VFP) in Boston to give a voice to the large number of active duty service people and veterans who are against this war, but are under various pressures to remain silent.
From its inception, IVAW has called for:
Mending Baghdad is a four-and-a-half-by-six-and-a-half-foot quilt memorializing Baghdad as it looked during the American bombing on the first nights of the Iraq war. The purpose of the project is to bring people together to do something symbolically curative for Iraq. The artist, Clare Wainwright, worked up the image in about two days, but left it deliberately unfinished.