Public Language

Outdoor installation
Philadelphia
September 2020

Public Language highlights the meaninglessness and ubiquity of phrases used by government figures and other institutional leaders to address recent global crises. Using vinyl text, I applied these sentence fragments on empty commercial shop windows in Washington Square West, my neighborhood in Philadelphia. The area includes the highly gentrified gayborhood of a historically Black city, and is now home to many hospitals and clinics; it saw the establishment of the Philadelphia AIDS Library in 1987.

The trite, placating phrases have little effect as they occupy the painful circumstances and unacknowledged histories to which they refer. Made large and plain, but rendered in my own handwriting, the work asks viewers to consider how this language may have interrupted even their own personal correspondence.