Luisa Caldwell

NLE Lab Gathering Place

• West Village Party (2013)
  Shopping bags, pencil, clear gesso, phosphorescent pint, lights, timer
  96 x 240 in.

West Village Party repurposes Luisa Caldwell’s collection of shopping bags – some gathered from stores currently on 8th Street. The bags are painted with glow-in the-dark images of the artist’s past and present shoes. As the lights dim on the wall of variegated bags, only the painted shoes “hover in space like apparitions.” West Village Party alludes to the gradual death of the majority of the shoe stores that saturated the block in the 1990s – early 2000s, as 8th Street succumbed to the dangers of over-specialized retail. Caldwell also pays tribute to the “artists and poets that walked this Village street, in certainly very stylish shoes.”