"There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails."
I finished The Lonely City last year in July when I was living in Greenpoint, NYC. If you met me at any point during that time (and the whole year after) I'd always bring up this book as one everyone should read. Reading it in the same city Laing wrote about helped me appreciate my trips to museums more, introduced me properly to Wojnarowicz's work, and helped contextualize the intense loneliness I was also feeling at the time. It was the work that kickstarted my thesis on anxiety, if Laing could write with such sensitivity about artists and how their loneliness manifested in their work, maybe I could try doing something similar.
So I challenged myself to design a cover for this work that has been so influential on my life and growth as an artist.
I wanted to reference the artists Laing spends time with. The result was a hybrid Warhol-Wojnarowicz figure in a coat from Edward Hopper's closet. The silhouette is Laing, her experience of isolation in New York informing her research and the empathy she displayed for these artists. The New York skyline is a mythic, murky presence that both subsumes the hybrid figure but is also affected by it. On the back cover it becomes a flattened version of itself, recognizable but alien at the same time.
