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People’s Instinctive Travels: Homage to the Tribe

Bay Pkwy (N)

People’s Instinctive Travels: Homage to the Tribe

Eamon Ore-Giron
A photograph of glass mosaic artwork on the platform walls of the Bay Parkway station in Brooklyn. Four panels of the colorful geometric abstract artwork are seen from across the platform with tracks in the foreground and brick buildings outside of the station in the background.
"People's Instinctive Travels: Homage to the Tribe" (2019) © Eamon Ore-Giron, NYCT Bay Pkwy Station. Photo: Peter Peirce

About the project

Eamon Ore-Giron worked with fabricator Mosaicos Venezianos de México to translate six original oil paintings into 24 glass mosaic panels that adorn the northbound and southbound platforms at the Bay Pkwy station in Brooklyn. Ore-Giron visualizes the world as abstract forms and shapes, and envisions the interaction and interplay of these shapes as a reflection of societal dynamics. This exchange between forms and his use of geometries symbolizes the ways in which people of different communities — such as those surrounding the Bay Pkwy station — negotiate their relationships with each other and new places, a process of reinvention and creation.  

The 12 mosaic panels on each platform reference the corresponding journey. As commuters travel southbound towards Coney Island, Ore-Giron’s designs reference the natural world, with fluid arcs and warm colors evoking the feelings one might have when going to the beach. The northbound platform mosaics mimic the movement of gears and the mechanics of the human-made world, conjuring feelings of New York’s ecstatic urban environment.  

"People’s Instinctive Travels: Homage to the Tribe" originates from Ore-Giron’s "certain nostalgia for global modernism," wherein "public works meant to create a kind of civic mindedness and unity." His dynamic visual language references this unity, combined with the timelessness of indigenous and craft traditions. It is Ore-Giron’s hope that these mosaics will offer subway riders a space to see the world anew through the shapes, forms, colors, and movements of these artworks. 

About the artist

Eamon Ore-Giron is an artist who uses his practice to explore the possibilities of transmutation, how concept and form morph and adapt as it moves between languages, cultures, and political systems. Using a vocabulary that consists of basic and geometric forms, Ore-Giron generates a pictorial language to eliminate the vestiges of representational imagery.

Notably influenced by the Latin American traditions of Art Concrete, including but not limited to Kinetic Abstraction, Neo-Constructivism, and Constructivism, Ore-Giron explores the inherent flatness of pictorial space in compositions. He received his BFA at San Francisco Art Institute and MFA from University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited and performed at the Whitney Biennial, New York; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Prospect 3, New Orleans; and Perez Art Museum, Miami, among others.