In what ways do art, architecture, and design not simply represent a world that already exists, but actually participate in the creation of that world, acting not simply as a mirror but as a means of transformation?  How do these different kinds of work challenge our ideas of representation, allowing viewers to take an active role in the creation of meaning in cities?

These general questions reflect the more specific focus of the exhibition “The Soul is the Size of Elsewhere”: Brooklyn and Development, in which four different cultural producers investigate community and development in our borough.  Development has become a highly polarizing word for many people, at once authorizing what it is also meant to explain: matter-of-fact changes in the way the borough looks or acts.  Brooklyn is a place of nostalgia, imagination, or fantasy as much as a physical space, an “outer borough” of New York City.  Using diverse visual languages, the artists and designers participating in this exhibition explore the often conflicted meanings of Brooklyn’s transformation and the concept of development itself. 

Our belief is that the resulting collision of different techniques, points of view, and process-oriented projects will allow viewers to reconsider their own relationships to the communities in which they live and work.  From Bill Kontzias’ photographic portraits of his Ft. Greene neighborhood to Brooklyn Exchanges’s examination of development in the downtown triangle formed by Fulton Mall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Atlantic Yards, and from Guy Ambrosino’s transformative use of material from the Atlantic Yards to Proteus Gowanus’s interdisciplinary exploration of creative processes generated by the Gowanus Canal neighborhood, this exhibition actively engages our contemporary moment by connecting it to Brooklyn’s past and future. 

In doing so, “The Soul is the Size of Elsewhere” is about the potential of art, architecture, and design to stimulate discussions about the kinds of future cities we want.  We wish to make the process of urbanism visible, or more specifically, to make hidden political and social processes visible, and to give viewers a chance to understand how specific places and their respective histories are often in tension with many current development projects.  Finally, we provide a critical examination of development as it is or has been defined in contemporary and historical terms.