Coron's Cities

Today's CBS Sunday Morning featured a piece on "The Return Of The Silhouette," those portraits fashioned from paper and scissors. While many of the new artworks presented resembled the old Victorian versions that immediately come to mind, the works of Béatrice Coron stood our for the scale involved as well as the subject matter, the city.



The above piece, titled Inner City, presents the city as a flattened skyline composed of windows open to the gaze of the viewer. Coron says, "I started the cityscape when I arrived [in New York]. It becomes a kind of medium to say stories. Because usually you have windows to look out on things. And I'm doing windows for looking in."



The above detail of Inner City starts to illustrate the scale and level of detail of the piece (52" x 162"), where each window contains a life captured in some sort of stasis. The image below -- though from a different piece called Mule Train -- gets at this detail within here work, from the street furniture and creatures to the types of shoes each person wears.



One of my favorites from Coron's web site is Balloon City: A Floating World, where the city is carried above fields of agriculture on hot-air balloons. It's like a melding of the contemporary city in imagination and the pleasant, Victorian-era way of thinking about the land, where ropes and parachutes allow a free movement between the two realms.