80-meter past and future: a Manhattan silhouette taken by Sabine Hornig at LaGuardia Airport in New York, taken from Brooklyn, collaged from 1,140 personal images, funded by the Public Art Fund
Image: Sabine Hornig
A huge glass window at LaGuardia Airport shows how New York always outlines the future in a medieval style.
widthIf he likes to open the whole street in the movie Inception, he will love the huge windows of the new terminal B of New York’s large LaGuardia Domestic Airport, which opened at the end of June: German artist Sabine Hornig’s 80-meter skyline is composed of 1,140 inverted city images. They are built-in swings of the Manhattan bar chart, seen from a distance through the windows of the airport where it is installed. Every minute of the day, incident light changes the work itself and the image on the floor of the 80-meter-long corridor between the airport arrival area and the new counter lobby. The impressionist panorama consists of two skylines. The pale yellow and golden skyline hangs backwards from the ceiling, and the second skyline rises from below, pushing itself into the gap between the first golden tower in dark blue and green tones. Each building has a positive and a negative form next to it, which is created by the space between the towers. Due to the blue dominant horizon color, the advent calendar of this building moves far away, thanks to the extremely high image resolution of the 1,140 eagle moments on the attic and kitchen table, while magnifying life to a position close to the viewer.
Although the white streamlined terminal building and jewel-like windows look not old at all, this huge window gives the building a medieval feel. Under the 80-meter-long light on the floor, it becomes a Traffic Cathedral. The hustle and bustle of the modern airport has been forgotten for a few seconds; in the eyes of the traffic typhoon, you seem to be in a sacred space in which only organ music is missing. Travelers with wheeled suitcases, they are just in the game, stopping to immerse themselves in the game of light for a few minutes. This medieval charging and sanctification of the passage space is due on the one hand to the memory of such gem-like windows usually found in churches, and on the other hand to the collage technique used by the artist of the composite picture compartment similar to the old lead window.
