Parcs. Playgrounds presents a meditation on public space through documenta- tion of empty playground sites across New York City, captured by Myriam Yates in 2018. The formal composition of these photographs, shot front-on and at a distance, encourages us to observe the modernist overtones in public play sites. When captured without human interaction, these structures mirror minimalist architecture and sculpture with their materials of steel, concrete, fibreglass and plastic. This parallel gives each site the aura of a monument and by extension, the potential to become a ruin; with the possibility for abandonment, erosion, and nature’s repossession.
Across the series, many playgrounds are surrounded by apartment buildings and urban structures. Windows, gates, and air conditioners occupy the space of horizons, edges, and borders. In contrast, the sites that show green space and surrounding nature, convey different social signifiers of class, access, and capital despite the absence of human subjects. This tension between how a space is designated socially and it’s formalist reality, is a thread across Yates broader practice.
Often filming or photographing abandoned sites such as racetracks and airport terminals, Yates is drawn to interstitial space. These zones are in a temporal transition; shifting from the pace of human activities like leisure, travel, and play, to the stillness of material breakdown through weathering and geological time. In an era when climate change has focused our attention to the future and the need for sustainability, Yate’s work presents a concurrent landscape often overlooked yet all around us; the slow material breakdown of modernity. Parcs. Playgrounds presents a compelling body of work that typifies such transitory space; documenting sites that we occupy in our development stages, later abandon, and sometimes return to.
April Thompson
Look at the Opuscule
