ArtAwake: Exploring the beauty found on the other side of the tracks
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On Friday, March 28, in broad daylight, in an old warehouse next to the railroad tracks on the city’s east side, Stephanie Croawford sat silently as strangers took scissors to her hair and painted graffiti on her face and arms and clothes with a tube of Barbie pink lipstick. Dozens of passers-by stopped and whispered and took snapshots. And then, they too chose either the scissors or the lipstick, before heading off to watch the Volta Trio play the xylophones.
Croawford runs her fingers though her new choppy, asymetrical bob, her mouth is now a garish, bubblegum pink slash.
“I wasn’t sure people would do it,” she said. The SUNY Brockport art major and performance artist is satisfied that six people chose to cut her hair. “You could see people hesitate before they picked up the scissors, but in the end it was kind of exhilarating.”
Exhilarating is the perfect word to describe the atmosphere at Station 55. An ecclectic mixture of art, music and people collided in a once abandoned warehouse, now converted into stylish loft apartments and retail space. ArtAwake, sponsored by the University of Rochester Students’ Association featured local bands and artists. It was just what Rochesterians needed to shake off the winter doldrums.
“Oh my God!, you have to go in there,” said University of Buffalo film student Siobhan Pierre as she emerged from an exibit presented by Sohee Gu and Colin Kinz. Inside the darkened space, one wall was decorated with an architectural drawing of the University of Rochester. A TV set continuously looped images shot from the campus as the camera panned across the river and showed images of the neglected neighborhood along Genessee street. Against the other wall which represented U of R’s neighbors, there was a RTS bus stop sign and a concrete bench. A steel chain link fence separated the two parts of the exhibit. In the background, a taped conversation played. On the tape, the annonymous speakers expressed their fears about the neighborhood, about crime and about the people that live and work close to the campus—they did not know they were being recorded.
“I have never been on this side of town, mostly because of the same reasons the people on the tape were talking about,” Pierre said. “But I would have never admitted it—not out loud.”
As Baby Shiver’s Boutique played in the background, Pierre had a revelation.
“I’m so glad I came today, I learned alot about myself and it’s a whole lot different than who I thought I was. I learned that there is beauty all around us—sometimes even in the places that scare us…and it only cost me three dollars to find that out,” she said. “It was worth the price of admission.”
