“sorry about your car” is a project I created through The Work Office, an art initiative dreamed up by Naomi Miller and Katarina Jerinic. TWO asks artists to come up with projects that respond to their communities and/or the current economic climate. Proposals are selected, artists are notified and have one week to complete their work. The week culminates with an opening, or Payday Party, where each artist receives a check for $23.50, the weekly wages for an artist employed through the WPA during the 1930s.

My project began with me noticing the strangely common, large piles of shattered auto glass scattered across the sidewalks in my neighborhood. After a Friday or Saturday night, it seems like every block shows some evidence of a broken window or windshield. I feel very safe in my neighborhood but it’s just so bizarre how frequent and consistently this sort of thing happens.

What also struck me about the glass was the disparity between my initial reactions. I was disturbed by the implications of the glass (robbery, violence, invasion), while at the same time finding the physical qualities of the shards to be appealing and beautiful in a way. Their sheen, color, and near uniformity attracted me; not something I usually feel about street detritus interspersed with cigarette butts, beer, hair, sand and dirt. I wanted to do a project for TWO that would combine community service with my own selfish aesthetic desires.

So I got a bucket and some gloves, put on my sneakers and went for a walk around my neighborhood one Saturday afternoon.

I quickly collected 10 pounds of glass shards. I found one particularly large pile of privacy glass, tinted to a smoky near-black shade, on a street that I walk down on my way to the laundromat. Nearby I found another sizable pile of standard car window glass, just around the corner from the subway and across the street from a playground. I found several more small piles against the curbs or spread around trees planted into the sidewalk on the surrounding streets. Sometimes the car with the missing pane was still parked in the same spot where the pieces now lay.

Using a variety of materials, I formed the broken pieces into abstract, crystal-like forms. Crystals seemed to have an obvious visual correlation, but even more so, I liked the play between making something that was organic out of safety glass; making covetable gems out of nuisance trash. The bits of glass cleave to each other like jagged facets, not abiding to the geometry of genuine crystals but still suggesting the precious rock.

From the beginning, I did not want to simply take something from the streets and create objects that become my property. Property is an important issue of the project, and I wanted to act in way where I both took and gave, allowing the sculptural outcome to exist as an (admittedly impermanent) installation, rather than an object that is not shared. I liked the idea of putting them back out where the pieces they are composed of were first collected. It made me feel as if I was “returning” them. The image of them on the sidewalk also brought up several different references: graffiti, memorials, untended piles of dog shit. At close range they become more recognizable as faux stalagmites, inviting you to glance and scratch your head for a moment.

The nature of their fabrication means these are not meant to last. They will be stepped on, run over, scattered, thrown away; they might fall apart returning to their former piles. I have also considered that they might be stolen themselves. I would be pretty pleased with that.