Cars are a defining feature of the landscape and social space
of Southern California. Especially in San Diego, where freeways weave
like dangerous ribbons through a terrain of strip malls and tract
housing, driving is an almost inescapable part of daily life.
Car Park is a site specific public art project held in 1994, in San Diego, California.
Nina Katchadourian, Steven Matheson and Mark Tribe were invited to work collaboratively on a site-specific project at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California for inSite '94, a binational art exhibition that takes place at various locations throughout San Diego and Tijuana.
Southwestern College is surrounded by a moat-like ring of parking lots. You can't enter the campus without crossing a sea of concrete. Each day, Southwestern's 3,477 parking spaces fill and empty several times with the cars of the students, faculty and staff who commute to Southwestern from all over the San Diego and Tijuana area.
On August 31, 1994 from 6am to noon, a team of 50 professional and volunteer parking attendants directed the arriving cars to predetermined lots according to car color. Each of the fourteen lots was filled with cars of a different color: dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic raspberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green and red.
By choosing the parking lots as focus of attention, this project was able to transform parking from a process in which individual drivers compete for space, into a kind of game in which the entire community participates.
The result was a space that was both visually exciting and thought provoking.
Usually we do all we can to make the process of commuting and parking disappear, to drown it in talk radio or lose it in a daydream. Freeways and parking lots form an arena in which Southern Californians vent aggression as they vie for social status.
Nina Katchadourian, Steven Matheson and Mark Tribe were invited to work collaboratively on a site-specific project at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California for inSite '94, a binational art exhibition that takes place at various locations throughout San Diego and Tijuana.
Southwestern College is surrounded by a moat-like ring of parking lots. You can't enter the campus without crossing a sea of concrete. Each day, Southwestern's 3,477 parking spaces fill and empty several times with the cars of the students, faculty and staff who commute to Southwestern from all over the San Diego and Tijuana area.
On August 31, 1994 from 6am to noon, a team of 50 professional and volunteer parking attendants directed the arriving cars to predetermined lots according to car color. Each of the fourteen lots was filled with cars of a different color: dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic raspberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green and red.
By choosing the parking lots as focus of attention, this project was able to transform parking from a process in which individual drivers compete for space, into a kind of game in which the entire community participates.
The result was a space that was both visually exciting and thought provoking.
Usually we do all we can to make the process of commuting and parking disappear, to drown it in talk radio or lose it in a daydream. Freeways and parking lots form an arena in which Southern Californians vent aggression as they vie for social status.
