La Guardia Vistas

Exhibition View La Guardia Vistas, LaGuardia Airport, New York, 2020

La Guardia Vistas

Exhibition View La Guardia Vistas, LaGuardia Airport, New York, 2020

La Guardia Vistas

Exhibition View La Guardia Vistas, LaGuardia Airport, New York, 2020

La Guardia Vistas

Exhibition View La Guardia Vistas, LaGuardia Airport, New York, 2020

La Guardia Vistas

Exhibition View La Guardia Vistas, LaGuardia Airport, New York, 2020

La Guardia Vistas

Exhibition View La Guardia Vistas, LaGuardia Airport, New York, 2020

La Guardia Vistas

Exhibition View La Guardia Vistas, LaGuardia Airport, New York, 2020

La Guardia Vistas

Exhibition View La Guardia Vistas, LaGuardia Airport, New York, 2020

La Guardia Vistas

Exhibition View La Guardia Vistas, LaGuardia Airport, New York, 2020

LA GUARDIA VISTAS, 2020

LaGuardia Airport, New York

Permanent Installation

2020

La Guardia Vistas

2020
Latex ink and vinyl mounted on glass
1284cm high x 8177cm wide
Commissioned by LaGuardia Gateway Partners in partnership with Public Art Fund
Permanent installation, curated by Public Art Fund, New York
Photos by Nicholas Night, Sabine Hornig and Rachel Peddersen


Press:

Metropolis der Zeitmaschinen: Ein riesiges Glasfenster zeigt, wie New York mit Mittelalterlichen Formen die Zukunft beschwört - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (with English translation)

Jeppe Hein, Sabine Hornig, Laura Owens, Sarah Sze: Terminal B at LaGuardia Airport - Public Art Fund

Art That Might Make You Want to Go to La Guardia - The New York Times

La Guardia Vistas, New York 2020

La Guardia Vistas is a large photographic artwork on glass, in which passages of text are incorporated. It is installed on the window of the pedestrian connector bridge of LaGuardia Airport’s new Terminal B, and depicts a dramatic invented image of an inverted New York City skyline washing the connector with color, image and text.

The work brings the view of the distant skyline into the space, like an inverted projection of a camera obscura. The entire glass façade becomes a single transparency (diapositive), with the sun serving as the light source. Depending on the time of day, the light will project the work into the space; onto the floor, ceilings, and walls.

Emerging from positive and negative binaries, this pair of interlocking cityscapes symbolically reverses the hierarchies of the buildings while simultaneously revealing the complex social confrontations of a megacity with the tallest skyscrapers meeting the smallest houses.

The work brings together the New York skyline and textual elements, weaving fragments from the speeches and writings of
Fiorello La Guardia, former New York City Mayor (1934-1946) into the image. It portrays a large-scale overview of the city, while also providing the opportunity to move closer and zoom into details to discover details in the windows.

The inverted images reflect simultaneous occurrences in the city space, referencing La Guardia’s view of New York City’s unique image as “the entire world in microcosm“ (Bayor, 2018). It also refers to the discussions in various economic theories regarding the likelihood of wealth trickling down from above or whether it can instead rise up from below.

The composition comprises 1104 individual photographs taken and seamlessly woven together by Hornig and her team, forming the largest continuous high-resolution photographic image on architectural glass to date.

La Guardia Vistas was commissioned by LaGuardia Gateway Partners in partnership with Public Art Fund for La Guardia Airport´s Terminal B.
Photos by Nicholas Knight, Sabine Hornig and Rashel Peddersen, courtesy of the artist, LaGuardia Gateway Partners, Public Art Fund, NY and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York/ Los Angeles

Sabine Hornig thanks Public Art Fund, LaGuardia Gateway Partners, and all those involved in realizing this project, especially under the difficult conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

Sabine Hornig
2020



Quoted texts courtesy of:

Bayor, Ronald H. Fiorello La Guardia: Ethnicity, Reform, and Urban Development. Hoboken: Wiley, 2018; Brodsky, Alyn. The Great Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of the City of New York. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003; Fiorello H. La Guardia Collection, La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, NY; The New York Times TimesMachine; Rossini, Daniela. Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008; Williams, Mason B. City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.

Sabine Hornig gratefully acknowledges Arnold Dreyblatt, Markus Hannes, Bettina Hertrampf, Dirk Lebahn, Hilette Lindeque, Mark Pokorny, Martin Rossmann, Annette Überlein, Edye Weissler, ColorX (Serhat Cokuk, Gary Teich), Grieger GmbH (Jörg Lotz, Ute Zeise), Phase One, Heinz Papst, The Municipal Archives New York, The New York Times Archive, The Public Library, Ronald H. Bayer, Adrian Benepe, Joel Draper, Thomas Kessner, Mason B. Williams, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York-Los Angeles.