New Yorkers can now see two new mosaic installations in Williamsburg’s Metropolitan Avenue-Lorimer Street subway stop. Officially announced last week, Jackie Chang’s Signs of Life (2024) and Chloë Bass’s Personal Choice #5 (2023) are displayed on opposite ends of the sprawling Brooklyn station, where commuters transfer from the L to G trains.
On the Metropolitan side, Chang added two new panels to her preexisting series Signs of Life, originally installed in 2000. One shows the words “Truth” and “Trust” on either end of a glass-tiled iceberg; the other features a gilded Armillaria mushroom between the words “Once” and “Ones.” Additional works in the series display similarly related pairings, including “Mankind” and “Itself,” “Faith” and “Fate,” “Same” and “Sane,” and “Use” and “Less.”
“For me, a word, like an image, is worth a thousand words. Our association with each word is very personal,” Chang told Hyperallergic, explaining that her compositions are inspired by the Chinese written language’s origin in symbols that share a physical resemblance with the ideas they represent.
“The concept for Signs of Life is centered on offering riders ‘food for thought’ as they travel through the station,” the artist continued. “I hope that riders will find new personal meaning with each repeated encounter of the work as they journey through the station and through life.”
On the far end of the station, Chloë Bass’s three-panel Personal Choice #5 (2023) spreads across the L train entrance like an open book, each mosaic bearing a phrase. Together, they read: “Whenever I’m pulled under by the weight of all I miss, I take some consolation that I have known, and may yet know, another life.”
Below the metal lettering, bodies cluster together, sometimes touching in gentle gestures and other times appearing uncomfortably close. Bass continued her ongoing practice of utilizing historic images from the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, and here relied on photographs captured near the Lorimer station. Two Orthodox Jewish people walk briskly in long coats, a group of idling teenagers pair off in tight embraces, and two seated men are caught in conversation, an apparently intentional gap between them. The bleak underground ceiling cuts off each figure’s face, anonymizing the mosaics’ subjects.
“Making a work for the subway — truly one of my favorite places to engage with the complex feelings that being alone in public can raise — allows me to demonstrate different gestures of intimacy and contact (sometimes extreme contact, whether positive or negative) that exist alongside the consequences of having 8 million neighbors you do not know,” said Bass, who has contributed to Hyperallergic. She called New York a “tremendously intimate place.”
Bass said she had “a small pile of possible phrases for the work” but wasn’t particularly attached to any. “Choosing the images and choosing the sentence became a kind of instinctive matching game,” said the artist.
On the morning of June 17, Ronnie, a 32-year-old Williamsburg-based musician, walked by the murals during his morning commute. He told Hyperallergic he was noticing them for the first time, and gestured toward the central panel with the teenagers.
“On one hand, there’s a sense of camaraderie and togetherness, but there’s also a bit of a foreboding feeling, especially as I’m heading into the subway,” he said. After viewing the two additional panels opposite each set of turnstiles and then reading Bass’s prose aloud, the musician remarked, “Wow — I like it more now. It’s more profound than I was getting ready to appreciate.”
