Artist Statement: Created for Little Island at Pier 55, my Sing for Hope Piano entitled “Reflections” celebrates the opening of the brand new pier on Manhattan's southwest riverside that doubles as a public park and a world-class outdoor performance space. Little Island's 132 bell-shaped concrete pods inspired the piece, each pod with a unique form and tessellation fused to create undulating topography floating above the water. Overlapping pentagons and hexagons take on different colors found on the Island, including sky, water, concrete pods, corten steel railings and planters, pavements, and landscape. Pockets of colors vary in scale and fuse to capture the Island's reflection onto the water's surface along with the light and shadow of the water ripples onto the underside of the structure. Just as the old wooden structural piles that blanket Hudson River became the inspiration for Little Island, Reflections is ultimately an homage to New York City, its people, and its history. Nestled within intimate pockets of performance spaces on the Island, the piano not only overlooks water but, more importantly, faces and celebrates the cityscape. Especially after a strange year filled with grief and isolation for many New Yorkers, Reflections is a vehicle for the collective celebration of shared objects, spaces, and experiences. It honors human fragility and strength. And its scattered reflective fragments feature bits and pieces of the excellent company surrounding us – our city and fellow citizens.
Jieun Yang is the founding principal of Habitat Workshop, an award-winning architecture and urban design studio based in Brooklyn, NY. Working across multiples scales and types of projects, the studio creates spaces, objects, ideas, and experiences that embrace human connection and placemaking. Through cross-disciplinary collaboration and experiments that bridge art and design, the studio believes in the extraordinary potential of the ordinary and promotes design as a framework for positive changes.
