A new installation at Hartford's Real Art Ways imagines New York City lifting off to Mars, building by building.
Visual artist Joshua Frankel's film "Plan of the City" starts out with a lone flutist playing amid an animated backdrop of policemen and thousands waiting in line.
PLAN OF THE CITY (3 min excerpt) from Joshua Frankel on Vimeo.
As the film unfolds, members of the chamber group NOW Ensemble join in, making their way through an animated New York City backdrop comprised of collages of iconic New York images. The ensemble eventually enters an empty water tower and lifts off, leaving Earth, along with the rest of New York City, building by building.
Their final destination: Mars.
Joshua Frankel said the idea started as a mural where elevated subways take off into the sky. "That's the place where lifting off in the air started, and I think from there I started think about water towers, which seemed to be pointing to the sky," Frankel said. "So I see those, and I think about Rockefeller Center, and the art-deco architecture, with uninterrupted verticals pointing up, and I started to develop this conspiracy theory in my mind of rockets hidden inside the architecture."
"Plan of the City" opens Thursday night at Real Art Ways in Hartford, and runs through the end of March.
