Visual Studies faculty, Alan Ruiz’s site-specific window intervention on view in West Village.
Alan Ruiz’s Precincts explores the boundaries of the West 10th Window by confronting the space of the display as a volume, as opposed to a container, through a series of customized vertical white aluminum sheets. Precincts simultaneously references the surrounding neighborhood: the 6th Precinct of the New York Police Department (which is immediately adjacent to the West 10th Window) and the shopping district on Bleecker Street. Rather than displaying an object for consumption, Ruiz inverts the traditional storefront window display by redirecting the viewer’s gaze through and out of the window. The white aluminum sheets fill the volume of the space, but are cut in such a way to create a visual passageway that redirects the viewer’s vision towards the police precinct and neighboring private property. As such, Precincts warrants a kind of physicalized act of looking that subverts the notion of consumption while referencing surveillance via the viewer’s redirected gaze. Precincts relates to Ruiz’s wider artistic practice of exploring the tensions between standardized materials and customization, as well as the relationship between architecture and power, particularly as it relates to the delineation and control of public and private space.
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