I M A G I N E

Rose Marcus’s recent photographs focus on icons in New York City. She gives people what they see but don’t produce. The entry points of image production - commerce and our personal need to be seen and felt - are removed. The tone, content and method of the work populist, but the results capture a specific choreography we all unconsciously enact in public. Popular space is paused. We are at the bus stop. We are holding our thigh nervously. We are pressing on the ground.

Traffic stops, we walk across the street and we enter free rolling space. The threshold between the line of inside and outside of Central Park is marked. The vehicle is gone; all that is left are the lights, the eyes. They fall to the ground.

Repeated visits to a monument are longstanding ritual act: touch the foot of a Roman saint until the foot is unrecognizable from wear. The Imagine monument is both a monument to world peace and a memorial to a assassinated pop star. Visitors come and walk on the memorial that reads Imagine. The movement is constant. Someone is always playing Beatles songs on an acoustic guitar. It is purportedly sinking because of so much weight from so many visitors.