The capitalization of the Industrial Revolution and the idea of “every man for himself” train us, through the streets of the city, to dialogue and negotiate with discomfort — an expression of unmet needs that, taken together, become reciprocal dissatisfactions. On their own and in their entirety, the streets of Mexico City invite us to think of and read them as a stage of identity values expressed both in signs and in the ironwork of windows and doors. The ornamentation of each block embodies and amplifies judgments about what is considered good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Decoration, as an identity term, defends the dogmas of an implicit and inexplicable tradition against ostentatious and rational ways of stripping away and constructing a cosmopolitan condition alien to any citizenship.
Curtain Walls by George Rush duplicates, through collage and photography, the pedestrian’s experience when confronted with the transitory totality of these neighborhoods. The time of a walk through Mexico City makes it possible to believe that in the meantime we have witnessed the synthesis of oppositions that appear simply by crossing an avenue dividing two neighborhoods of different eras: moving from a present identical to any other city but skeptical of the local geography, to a polyphony of voices rooted in doors, walls, tiles, flowerpots, and graffiti — but also in fences that at once serve as trenches against forgotten cracks later transformed into potholes and gaps.
The journey of Curtain Walls suggests an itinerary at the scale of a street map which, like a palimpsest, reflects not only the multiple folds of certain streets but also the different experiences lived there by pedestrians tempted to wander and observe — personal experiences that, in this map, become a new fugitive inhabitant, escaping tourist programs and urban mobility plans. A cautious, reserved, measured gaze — a well-gazed gaze born from the city’s challenge to interpret its strata, to move through and understand the path that leads from new buildings to old neighborhoods.
The traditional narrative of traversing a story is inverted by Curtain Walls into the story of a traversal, a transition that in a way constitutes a tautology — one from which George Rush escapes through sequences of fleeting instants, accidental juxtapositions, revealed like observations of brief walks captured in the collage.
Curtain Walls by George Rush duplicates, through collage and photography, the pedestrian’s experience when confronted with the transitory totality of these neighborhoods. The time of a walk through Mexico City makes it possible to believe that in the meantime we have witnessed the synthesis of oppositions that appear simply by crossing an avenue dividing two neighborhoods of different eras: moving from a present identical to any other city but skeptical of the local geography, to a polyphony of voices rooted in doors, walls, tiles, flowerpots, and graffiti — but also in fences that at once serve as trenches against forgotten cracks later transformed into potholes and gaps.
The journey of Curtain Walls suggests an itinerary at the scale of a street map which, like a palimpsest, reflects not only the multiple folds of certain streets but also the different experiences lived there by pedestrians tempted to wander and observe — personal experiences that, in this map, become a new fugitive inhabitant, escaping tourist programs and urban mobility plans. A cautious, reserved, measured gaze — a well-gazed gaze born from the city’s challenge to interpret its strata, to move through and understand the path that leads from new buildings to old neighborhoods.
The traditional narrative of traversing a story is inverted by Curtain Walls into the story of a traversal, a transition that in a way constitutes a tautology — one from which George Rush escapes through sequences of fleeting instants, accidental juxtapositions, revealed like observations of brief walks captured in the collage.
