06 Dec 2018

Stephanie Cardon: Unless

Now + There, Prudential Center, Boylston Entrance

Reviewed by Heather Kapplow

The industrial becomes sherbet when light shines through it. In thirty minutes of sitting with Stephanie Cardon's Unless (2018), no one stops to read or examine this public art piece. Perhaps the material is so familiar, people can't recognize it when it is being utilized for anything but the labor of landscape "improvement" or landscape "development." Perhaps it's also because the color is so deeply integrated into the advertising at this site. A large sneaker ad, the Cheesecake Factory, and Louis Vuitton are all using roughly the same orange in the same context.

Despite the both structural and contextual issues that make Cardon's text hard to read, the reading is worth it. Her process is beautiful, both as it is visible in the final work, and as it is explained in the accompanying signage. The text wraps around the environment beyond the window, and the orange patchwork of squares glowing around the atrium puts the viewer gently inside a set of problems that can't be escaped by shopping.