Let’s talk about birds, exotic birds.
Parakeets are the modern birds for our cities. Displaced and carrying implied places. Thriving despite the changes in their world and its landscape, moved from one place to another for many possible reasons – and – almost against common sense, grasping the nature of the new and unfamiliar reality and coping with it.
Finding the symbolism hidden in the urbanized landscape allows us to understand modernity on a figurative level that borders on the spiritual. The loneliness and ambivalence that define our modern experiences can be located physically and talked of without words. In this way, feelings grow out of austere walls, out of the metallic shell of an airplane, out from a subway tunnel with a warning breeze, from a light of a television tower.
I’m interested in creating a print-based exploration of the architecture and natural landscape in and around Amsterdam, culminating in an animation that reflects ideas for the future of those places. Through prints, sculpture, installation, and animation, I ask viewers to identify with an imagined future that is both familiar and novel, but neither strictly utopian nor dystopian. I seek a poignant ambiguity that considers the contemporary world as not necessarily doomed, but vulnerable to self-destruction; especially without the willingness to imagine what a positive outcome would look like instead.
I was born and raised in the dense, industrial state of New Jersey, 13 miles west of New York City, and I find that my complicated relationship with its sprawl continues to shape how I think about cities, nature, and the uncertain future of our mechanized world. In a recent project, Meadowlands, I created an installation that suggested a future for the abused wetlands of my home state, addressing reclamation of sites of car-culture (malls, parking lots, highways), as well as the necessity for healthy density. In the Netherlands, I look forward to learning about what unique issues affect Amsterdam and its surroundings, and what ideas exist there regarding its future.
Izzy Liberti , 1996, USA/Italy