Statement of Interest: Kim Carlino

Recently I have been quite focused on the built landscape, sense of place, or placeless-ness in our everyday.  I am looking at the subtle effects over time on our psyche of these manufactured "places" that have become the imprint of what it means to live in the world right now.  We have built up immunity to being able to see this constructed landscape around us that comes in the form of superstores and super long shopping strips, and McMansions.  Places that are engineered and designed to give us a false sense of community and convenience.  Places that leave us feeling disconnected to community.   We have become immune to this, as it has seeped into our sense of being as normalcy.  As I have looked at the built versus natural landscape and what is left, I have begun to look critically at the everyday.   I have become fascinated with the telephone pole and how it lines our streets, crisscrosses are daily commute, and the criticality of it to our existence.   Often we become so caught up in daily life, and we become surrounded by these manmade objects, such as telephone poles and power lines.   We don't even notice how they inhabit the space that we are in.  I am looking to parallel metaphorically the manmade with the natural by looking at one of the common building blocks of our world.   As I think about the human relationship to nature, I see parallels to the telephone pole.  Throughout history the relationship that we have had with nature is one mostly of exploitation(not the case with everyone), so I look at this telephone pole, made of wood, and it again becomes the support for our daily life.  It is supporting our fast-paced modern life through allowing communication and high-speed connection all around the world.   And I don't argue for that to change because I know that it is integral to our existence, but I mean to acknowledge this human relationship that we have and possibly cause us to think more broadly about an interaction that brings about more balance. 

I will be using imagery of telephone poles/power lines, and within the process of decisions about composition, I will experiment with grouping them into groves, like trees, of telephone poles.  As the class progresses, I am interested in adding in layers of hand drawn maps and plans for suburban-planned communities and homogenous buildings with the telephone poles.