Falcon Avenue, Seaside Walk, Dwight Street, Jarvis Street, Greene Street
1976

The painted steel plates that compose Jennifer Bartlett’s Falcon Avenue, Seaside Walk, Dwight Street, Jarvis Street, Greene Street are formatted on a grid. Bartlett uses the sequence of individual steel squares to develop a larger narrative composition, which shifts from representational forms, including avenues, houses, trees, and yards, to energetic painterly passages to total abstraction. Bartlett has called the house “just a given image” that she likes to use for formal experimentation: “its construction,” she remarked, “is very abstract, just squares that are very stable and that are divisible in an interesting number of ways.” And yet the home also symbolizes the realm of human activity. Here, it is even more specific—and autobiographical. Bartlett has associated major personal experiences (birth, childhood, marriage, graduate school, and divorce) with the five different addresses that are listed in the work’s title, and which appear to correspond with the work’s five-part structure.