VISUAL ARTS
The sadness and beauty of Unity Park
By Christopher Schobert, photos by Irene Haupt

Stuffed Rabbit with Bible, 2005
Driving through Niagara Falls a few weeks ago, I was struck by how many buildings seemed abandoned, an air of creepy emptiness surrounding them. As I contemplated this, my mind kept returning to a photograph by Michael Veit—Stuffed Rabbit with Bible. It haunted me when I first saw it, and has remained lodged in my cranium. It depicts a dirty, slumping, pink stuffed bunny, sitting on a dusty end table in a corner. Beneath the rabbit lies another stuffed toy, along with a brittle open book, and a bible. A fallen lamp shade is in view on the lower right-hand side, while some type of liquid has struck the walls. The effect is startling—there are signs of recent life, but how recent? The rabbit appears to have belonged to a child, but what of the bible, and the lampshade? Whose room is this? And where did everybody go?

Michael Veit’s Unity Park, a photographic exhibit at the Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls, does not attempt to answer these questions. What it does, instead, is present a series of sadly realistic images, all from the same shuttered housing project—Unity Park in the Falls—and makes us wonder. Running through September 14 as part of the Castellani’s TopSpin series, Veit’s work is gorgeous, somber, and fiercely profound. Like the best works of Larry Clark or Gus Van Sant, it finds a simple beauty in the decay of the everyday. According to Castellani curator Michael Beam, Unity Park was built in the early seventies, made up of 198 units. Its deterioration was evident by 1993, when an absentee landlord in Florida caused numerous complaints. The property was condemned by 2003, and the remaining families were moved. Demolition began in 2006, but luckily, Veit’s camera caught it before it was gone. “I’d been aware of the site for years beforehand but always had it at the end of my ‘to-do’ list since its scale was so much more intimate than the abandoned industrial sites I was shooting at the time,” says Veit, whose last project involved documenting Buffalo’s grain elevator region and who is currently working on a project on tourism in Niagara Falls. “So I was really surprised when its ‘smallness’ eventually drew me in and built, in total, to something that was pretty expansive.”

Looking at the images in Veit’s work, several themes pop up: poverty, the state of the American economy, and so on. “I think there are several threads running through Unity Park, but the most important one doesn’t really trace out some weighty, socio-economic message. Even if I’d had the intent to spin one, the material just wouldn’t have supported it, since few scenes I came across screamed ‘poverty’ as their loudest take-away message. Instead, what I found most frequent—and what was really most tantalizing—were ordinary objects that were part of domestic scenes you’d find just about anywhere else. The truth is that beyond social and economic differences, we all share huge commonalities. We’re all similar in the objects we surround ourselves with, and the sanctuaries we try to create to live within.” Veit says getting this universality across to viewers was a major challenge. “There’s no guarantee any single shot will be interpreted ‘correctly.’ But I think that by overpowering with scope—zooming in and out between the impersonal and deeply intimate, and the mundane and the dramatic—you can create an impressionistic sense of humanity that’s every bit as confusing and mixed up as we all personally experience it, and that you’re able to create a sense of commonality that way.”

Child’s Chair, 2006
When pondering the Niagara Falls location of Unity Park, it’s interesting to think of the casino not far away; this fact was not lost on Veit, who calls it an “Emerald City” amongst the squalor. “All I could think of during Buffalo’s casino debate was, ‘Don’t the deciders have cars to come up to the Falls to see how useless the casino has been? Shouldn’t someone scrape together their cab fare?’ But truthfully, the need for Unity Park and other projects like it predates the casino and will far outlast it. I don’t know what the answer is, and all the casino has proven is that there’s no quick and easy one.”

In a nice, likely unintentional tie-in, Projects of Working Life Taken by Working Hands, an exhibit of black-and-white photographs presented by Unseenamerica NYS, is on display through August 31 at the Niagara Falls Public Library (1425 Main Street in Niagara Falls). There is much to find in this collection, including grandmothers, Brazilian veterinarians, crane operators, and more. This is in line with Unseenamerica NYS’s goal of helping those whose lives escape media attention.

It’s a fascinating exhibit, and like Veit’s Unity Park, is helping to turn our collective gaze to the people and places we often ignore.

For more information on Unity Park, visit www.niagara.edu/cam or call 286-8200. For info on Projects of Working Life Taken by Working Hands, call 518-272-2500 or visit www.wdiny.org or www.bread-and-roses.com.

Christopher Schobert is associate editor of Buffalo Spree. He loves to ask, “Yes, but is it art?”


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