As I walked around the Hoboken Autobody looking at vehicles in various states of decline, a poem by Eli Siegel inspired me:
“The Lesson of Art”
Within debris
Is symmetry.
Most often, I think, debris is used to see the world as a messy, unpleasant place that can’t be liked. Art shows that the world deserves to be seen more fully by us, that is, aesthetically. For example, this bright car in the foreground has its door, hood, and trunk thrown open; like a jack-in-the-box that has just sprung, it is wild. But the fact that they are all thrown open on diagonals also makes for symmetry.
I positioned myself so that the car would fit neatly into the graceful curve of wrecks in the background with their crumpled metal and rich color. I wanted to join these forms—so surprising and orderly—with the people who might have owned them, and so I topped the frame off with the more rectangular shapes of the homes in the distance.