Collaged relief rubbings from the urban landscape. More info below.

I created this body of work mostly in 2017-2018 while living in Portland, Oregon and considering the utilities and urban planning that run the city—the American city generally, and Portland specifically. My hope is that the isolating of these recognizable designs generates more recognition of the urban systems they represent.

Relief rubbings are most associated with the centuries-old tradition of tombstone rubbings, a simple means of documentation. This series relates to the tombstone rubbings tradition in that I collected rubbings from fixed public sites. But it diverges from that tradition’s intent of preservation. There is not much reason to preserve the relief of a signal cover. But there is reason, I wanted to share, to notice a signal cover. I manipulated the rubbings through collage, allowing me to not only point out what I noticed, but to impart what that led me to consider. For instance, Crest (second in second row) salutes our ease of access to water, through water utility rubbings arranged like a coat of arms. Black Hole (right of Crest) offers a trompe l’oeil-like view of a partially removed manhole cover. The black hole beneath begs the question, What’s down there? If you’re like me, you may realize you don’t really know. But that leaves us more aware, and perhaps more appreciative, of our environment, the city.  

This body of work required me to work in public, drawing attention to my subject just by working on it. I had a sense of exercising/testing the ideals of public space as I conducted my odd and slightly suspicious looking work—kneeling on the sidewalk or in the street, scrubbing away with the puck-like crayons I made to cover large surface areas (see last 4 photos). It was also something of a public art education experience—at least one passerby had never seen a rubbing before.

The book Manhole Covers by Mimi and Robert A. Melnick was a great resource in developing this work. Four of these collages were exhibited at Groundwork Coffee Co. in Venice, Los Angeles in 2019, through Art Share L.A.’s partnership program Your Art Here.