Anonymous Architectures

Anonymous Architectures investigates two aspects of NYC’s temporary transformation during the Covid-19 pandemic. With an incisive mind these two New York artists Alexa Hoyer and Lauren Silberman document an abrupt stop to life as it was.  They ventured out to record the presence of absence to bear witness to boarded up storefronts and empty nightlife venues, all devoid of people, which had become relics of a new and unfamiliar landscape.

Window Dressing by Alexa Hoyer documents NYC storefronts during the Covid-19 pandemic and BLM protests. In June 2020 many luxury and department stores boarded up their windows. For several weeks, Alexa criss-crossed the city to research, map and photograph. High architecture and luxury signage juxtaposed with cheap plywood: The city’s iconic shopping districts seemed to inadvertently transform into a massive public sculptural installation.

Lauren Silberman’s The Lost Happy Hours is a collection of images of the bars and nightclubs in her neighborhood shuttered during the pandemic. For Silberman, these places became symbols of the loneliness that the isolation of quarantine caused; the clubs and bars of NYC serve as stages for social interaction, and with them closed came a presence of emptiness and a void of spontaneity caused by the pandemic. Stacks of bar stools, empty dance floors and taped off tables were all testaments to that surreal time, all laid bare in the absence of people.