Lourdes Correa-Carlo “Intended Trajectories”
Knockdown Center
[Image: Lourdes Correa-Carlo "Trajectories II" (detail) (2013) Digital image.]
This event has ended.
For her solo exhibition at Knockdown Center, Lourdes Correa-Carlo has produced seven new works in dialogue with urban embodiment and the visual politics of city space. Through sculpture, drawing, photography, video, and installation, Intended Trajectories reflects the artist’s ongoing engagement with her material surroundings, as well as her interest in the relationship between the body and the built environment.
The exhibition’s title refers to the ways in which bodies are moved by urban space, a movement at once spatial and affective. For those subjected by inequitable systems of race, gender, and class, the relationship between body and environment is often an ambivalent one, set apart by feelings of estrangement or dislocation. Its antagonisms not limited to hostile architecture or unpleasant design, the built environment reproduces the biases of its builders spatially in public transportation paths, parkway overpasses, and city skylines. For Correa-Carlo, the alienating effects of city space—the sense of not being able to place oneself—are seen and felt in the visual politics of seemingly neutral architectural and urban spaces, the structures in which ideologies take form.
Unfolding into space, Crawler (2011-2017) is a large-scale inkjet print of a skyscraper, rotated sideways and mounted on wood. Inextricable from the modernist mythos of New

York City, skyscrapers are representative of wealth and power in the popular imaginary, their powerful vertical lines and sheer scale acting as visual reinforcers of this authority. Forced sideways, formally tripped up, the skyscraper’s orthogonal command is disrupted, as is the privileged perspective that typically accompanies such a vantage.
Two site-specific installations reference Knockdown Center’s former use as a glass factory, and later as the site of a frame and door company, imitating the gallery’s vestigial industrial features and destabilizing the exhibition’s architectural frame. Both artwork and infrastructure, the camouflaged appendages of Extend (2017) take on a decidedly anthropomorphic character, repeating the forms and materials of the gallery’s pipework whilst creeping into space. Interval (2010-2017), a composite inkjet print of a derelict industrial building, is situated within an unassuming architectural threshold: a sliding metal door typically kept shut during gallery hours.
While these installations engage preexisting architectural elements, other sculptural and drawing-based works introduce outside views, yielding a constellation of cityscapes within the gallery that alter one’s sense of perspective and scale. The City from Above (2008-2017), a spray paint drawing on vinyl, offers an ambiguous aerial skyline of lights and lanterns, standing in for skyscrapers as though a Surrealist had taken to urban design. The City (2014-2017), a series of sculptures comprised of salvaged radiators, turns the viewpoint offered by The City from Above from one of distanced observation to that of an intimate encounter.
A series of vinyl prints transferred onto glass and a two-channel slideshow video evoke the interstitial spaces of waiting and watching routine to the city’s public transportation systems. Trajectories II (2013-2017) presents a sequence of views from the window of a Long Island Rail Road train car, though with no apparent horizon line, only the repeated lines of telephone cables provide orientation. In_Reverse (2015-2017) is comprised of photographs taken from the window of an underground subway train, from which, like individual cells in a filmstrip, the columns of the adjacent platforms fragment time and space—framing a view while marking a distance.
Mapping a psychogeography of encounter between artist and city, body and building, the works in the exhibition look inward and outward at once. Refusing the formation of a fixed viewpoint, Intended Trajectories instead attends to disorientation, to the incongruous sights and sensations of our city space.
Lourdes Correa-Carlo (b. 1970, San Juan) is an artist who works across drawing, photography, collage, video, sculpture, and installation. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and a BFA in Sculpture from Escuela de Artes Plásticas, San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY (2015-2017) and has previously held residencies at Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2013); Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX (2010-2012); and Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY (2011). Her work has been exhibited with institutions that include the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, NY; School of Visual Arts, New York, NY; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; Julius Caesar, Chicago, IL; Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY; and Art Center South Florida, Miami, FL.
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Schedule
from June 10, 2017 to July 16, 2017