PRUDENTIAL CENTER
Stephanie Cardon
Unless, 2018
UNLESS encases the glass walls and the center staircase of the main Prudential Center entryway, immersing the 80,000 individuals who pass through daily in a shared experience. Across the windows hangs a 3,400-square-foot contemporary tapestry made of repurposed neon orange and brilliant blue construction debris netting that incorporates embroidered text from Pope Francis’ Encyclical letter, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, a 2015 call urging swift and unified global action towards climate justice.
The symbolic blue circle featured on the tapestry is repeated on the floor and staircase, juxtaposing the warm, welcoming glow with a critical call to action — if everyone on the planet were to consume at the current US rate of consumption, the global population would require four earths to sustain itself. It’s time to think about the earth as a whole, as a common.
Cardon put the sustainable and equitable practices espoused in On Care for Our Common Home — caring for the environment and those who are most at risk — into action throughout the six-month creation of UNLESS. 30% of the netting used is upcycled directly from Boston-area construction sites, and to build the piece, 30 makers — members of the Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción community at the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts in Boston’s South End, as well as Mass Art students from Puerto Rico, displaced by 2017’s devastating hurricanes — worked alongside the artist and were paid fair wages to sew and repair the used netting.
UNLESS is a response to the challenges we face because of climate change and the action we can take to engage with more environmentally conscious approaches to our day-to-day urban lives.
LOCATION
PRUDENTIAL CENTER
Stephanie Cardon
Stephanie Cardon is an artist from France and the United States, who lives and works in Boston. Her work combines and contrasts materials and colors that commonly belong to the realm of construction and infrastructure. Her most recent pieces exist as exercises in building power and resilience through the repetition of fundamentally practical and humble gestures such as sewing, pouring concrete, or crocheting nets. Through the repetition of line, volume, shape and action, these pieces speak to the acquisition of techniques and skills. In their color, scale, and use of multiplication they become efforts in loudness and amplification.
Globalization of indifference.
Cardon’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at such places as deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, VSOP, and The Center for Maine Contemporary Art.She has been an artist-in-residence at The Wassaic Project, Ucross Foundation, AIRIE (Artist in Residence in the Everglades).. Cardon holds a BA in History and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford, a graduate certificate in Photography from ICP, and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Since 2016, she has been an Assistant Professor in Studio Foundation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
“Climate change knows no borders or nationalities but its effect will exacerbate the divisions we have drawn between peoples, fomenting xenophobia and racism. This is the time to come together across our differences to care for each other and to organize in defense of our common home.” — Stephanie Cardon