Queens Museum
After the Plaster Foundation

Window images:

Peter Scott, Arcadias, 2020

Nine semi-transparent large-scale photographs of luxury condo advertisements are mounted onto Queens Museum’s glass facade, which looks onto Flushing Meadows Corona Park. All the photographs were taken at construction sites across the city and feature green spaces as private amenities. The images are cropped in a way that makes the fiction of the ad look more real than its surroundings. Glimpses of the construction sites are visible, but the frame is mostly filled with the illusion of the ad itself. The images disorient us-- as do the recent dramatic changes in our neighborhoods.

Alluding to the universal appeal of nature as a means of veiling the aggressive effects of city-wide luxury development, Scott’s photographs bring images of green spaces as perks of the “good life” into direct conversation with one of New York’s biggest and best-used public parks.

Gallery Images:

Peter Scott, Future City, 2020

A series of images of advertisements found on the plywood fencing around luxury residential construction sites and marked up by dissenting graffiti, these photographs were taken over the course of the last five years in New York City neighborhoods undergoing major transformations: the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Ridgewood, and Chelsea near the High Line. As Scott says, “Documenting these reactions to a ‘future city’ is a way of describing two overlapping worlds: an image world imposing an urban fantasy on the public realm, and a real world responding to that fantasy.”