Swerve

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Artist Statement for Swerve

At the time I bought my house in Portland I began thinking more deeply about the city in which I’m putting down roots.  When I’m fascinated with a city, I start thinking of it as a living organism.  I picture its rivers as arteries that carry life-blood, its bridges as tendons pulling the banks together, its electrical wires as neurons zapping the signal along, and its tall buildings like a spiny outer shell that protects the city within.  I start to recognize it in the structure of cells, water diatoms, and human anatomy.  The city seems alive and pulsing with energy and consciousness.  I’m also intrigued by the concept of emergence in city structure, or finding patterns that emerge from the chaos.  Economist Jeffrey Goldstein defined emergence as, “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems”.  Looking at maps of freeway systems or the overviews of neighborhoods you can begin to see these patterns emerging.  But how did they appear and who planned them?  Are they the result of a top-down urban development project written by a consultant, or are they instead the product of “the swerve”?  The idea of “the swerve” is literally people swerving from their usual route through the city when they see something of interest.  This gradually changes traffic patterns, which in turn leads to more businesses, more swerving, and so on until you have an arts district or a collection of food carts.  It’s a poetic concept that, like the winding tunnels of ants or the intricate structure of honey combs, our city is planned from the bottom-up.  It’s built by the individual actions of the people who live there, creating a more complex whole.