Capturing New York’s Mysterious – and Humorous – Plastic Street Strife – The Village Voice

They sprout like fluorescent weeds — mostly orange, maybe lime-green, occasionally glowing with a fresh petrochemical sheen but more often begrimed, bashed, and bent. The lowly traffic cone by most accounts got its start, appropriately enough, in Los Angeles, in 1943. Soon the cones made their way east, and have become as much a fixture on New York macadam as those blue POLICE LINE — DO NOT CROSS sawhorses and Con Ed’s striped steam columns.

Over the past decade, beginning on social media, Alison Colby has been directing her lens at these colorful safety cones — “witch hats,” to some — that most New Yorkers register out of the corner of an eye only long enough to unconsciously step around them. Not sufficiently beefy for New York traffic — a duty relegated to sand-filled barriers or concrete slabs — cones in the City That Never Sleeps are used mostly for the lowest level of warning, such as jutting from a pothole or stuck like desultory birthday candles around a stretch of shattered sidewalk.

Courtesy Alison Colby

I first met Colby when she was the advertising production manager at the Village Voice, near the end of last century. Her maniacal attention to type leading lines and font kerning and the optimal weight of starburst frames for ad layouts manifests today in such dynamic compositions as the diagonal of a fallen cone mirrored by a discarded evergreen on the pavement, in “I’m So Sorry, Christmas Tree” — skewed angles and wan colors capturing the gray bathos of Yuletide’s passing. Through such visions, Colby brings a bit of NYC grit to the Hudson Valley’s bucolic expanses in her exhibit at the Wallkill River Center for the Arts, in the upstate town of Montgomery.

Courtesy Alison Colby

Some of the prints offer minimalist concision, such as “I Will Break You Hole,” which features a broad swathe of asphalt on which a single cone, topped by a white plastic bag, guards a similar-size pavement rupture filled with broken white styrofoam packing material.

Courtesy Alison Colby

In contrast, “Pink Bag Interruptus” is positively baroque, with yellow CAUTION tape straggling between four orange sentinels striated with reflective bands standing watch over a weathered wooden pallet and a pink garbage bag. The gang presents a tableau that might conjure attendants to the dry-docked barge of some curbside Cleopatra.

At times, Colby’s protagonists are positively animated, such as the three cones that seem to slalom through the undulating curves of a bicycle rack in “This Isn’t Going To Work….” Conversely, the plastic-shrouded stalwart in “Protected” might be a weathered monument awaiting restoration.

Courtesy Alison Colby

Colby sometimes uses a section of chain-link fence or surveyor’s spray-painted lines on a sidewalk to frame her languid characters — flâneurs of Gotham’s most prosaic thoroughfares. Not that these encroaching triangles can’t convey a hint of menace when gathered en masse with their flaming verticality and glaring striations, such as the mob in “Cluster Fuck.”

So, if you want to get out of town for a weekend jaunt but can’t quite leave New York’s bewitching mix of the noir and the absurd completely behind, Colby’s exhilarating transmutation of the mundane into art is just the summer ticket.  ❖

Alison Colby: #keepingitsecure
Wallkill River Center for the Arts
232 Ward Street, Montgomery, NY
Through September 1