CHANGE

January 21 - March 1, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, January 23, 2009
6:00-9:00 PM

Gallery Project presents Change, an exhibit encouraging artists to comment visually on features of America that they feel need altering for the good of society.
 
The exhibit’s focus is on system change broadly conceived. It includes relationships between people, government, work organizations, churches, educational institutions, and physical environments. The exhibit is about improving systems which drive our current lives and the course of America’s future. Please click here for more information about the exhibition.

Blackwell and Hutton’s piece H.O.P.E. Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere examines the changes in ideology around public housing in the past half century. The project compares the physical form of a public housing site in Toronto, Regent Park, to one in Detroit, Jeffries Homes, in three distinct historical periods, pre-war, post urban renewal, and current redevelopment. The project’s name is derived from HOPE VI the US legislation which governs the contemporary demolition of public housing and the rebuilding of its former sites as mixed income neighbourhoods.

These two examples of the destruction of modernist housing follow the ideological repudiation of public housing that began in the 1970s and reached full force in the early 1990s. The recent push towards homeownership as a solution to the housing challenges of low income people is the most recent point of this trajectory. Its repercussions can be felt in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 and in its derivative effects in 2008’s financial crisis. The people most affected by the devastation of urban renewal, the neglect of public housing, the displacement of contemporary redevelopment plans and the foreclosures of the subprime crisis, have been the lowest income urban citizens.

Assisted by: Marcin Kedzior, Gene Mastrangeli, Ariel Shepherd, Alejandro López Hernandez, Tomek Bartczak