Parks and the City: Conflict and Change
Artists: David Friedman, Jacob Geiger, Jennifer Mawson, Navidreza Haghighi Mood
The Fort Point Arts Community Gallery is pleased to announce “Parks and the City,” the first show of the 2020 season juried by Jessica Hong, Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art at Dartmouth University’s Hood Museum of Art. The four photographers in “Parks and the City”—David Friedman, Jacob Geiger, Jennifer Mawson, and Navidreza Haghighi Mood—examine the internal conflicts within the ideology of urban parks. They look beyond the celebrated landscape design and recreational program of the founders to the physical and experiential edges of the parks. Dark moments and tall weeds make visible the unstable character of nature in this artificial setting.

The photographers give their separate interpretations of the urban park as a site of conflict and change. They look afresh at one of the city’s greatest resources, challenging the idea of natural beauty and the ability of landscape design to establish a permanent meaning for the parks.

“Focusing on city parks, this exhibition will examine notions of public and private, ‘neutral’ and politicized space, and the complexities of controlling nature,” says Hong in making her selections for the season. “Though most urban dwellers experience the park in its finished form, these natural environments are highly planned and mediated spaces. Furthermore, as the landscape of Boston is developing rapidly, it is important to think about what this kind of urban design or sanitizing of the landscape is doing to the city, how it can erase the complicated, colonial histories of the Boston area, and, along with the past, how it affects the present and future.”

On Saturday, March 28, at 5:30, the artists will speak about the general context of their photographic project within the history of urban landscape photography, followed by presentations of their work by each of the artists.

Each of the photographers in “Parks and the City” takes a different approach to the general theme of parks; in combination, the four artists offer a contemporary look at the city’s century-old resource with their interpretations of the urban park as a site of conflict and change. Looking afresh at one of the city’s greatest resources, they challenge the idea of natural beauty and the ability of landscape design to establish a permanent meaning for parks.