One evening, just as the sky was getting dark and the lights had clicked on, I zigzagged on foot across all four of the bridges – Grand Boulevard, Walnut Street, Main Street and Baltimore Street – that comprise Pedestrian Strands. As traffic rushed by on the highway below, their headlights and taillights bounced alternately off and through the translucent panels—themselves printed with images drawn from the surrounding city. There were the reflections and refractions of light, the imprinted photographic patterns, the transparencies created by the layers of mesh and the panels, the LED’s illuminating it all, and, ultimately, the big views—the four bridges lined up in the landscape, and the lines of the panels reaching out towards the city grid. Yet among the many ways of looking at the work, there was no single privileged view—no single spot that was the obviously the place to stand. It struck me that while most art asks you to consider itself, Pedestrian Strands asks you to consider the city around it. Its experience is inclusive and open-ended—and therefore democratic.
Across Truman Road North from Pedestrian Strands there’s a new mural, painted with iconic images of Kansas City, that I take is meant to complement the presence of Kansas City Live! the Power and Light District’s outdoor performance space. There’s a giant illustration of the street signs at 18th and Vine, a jazz quartet shown in silhouette, and the Midland theater marquee. From certain points along the bridge, you can see the mural reflected in Pedestrian Strands; its crisp graphic lines smudged by the varying patterns in the glass, or washed out by the passing headlights of a truck. Looked at head on, its meaning is straightforward, more advertisement than art. Seen through the kaleidoscope of Pedestrian Strands, that’s no longer as true. The billboard becomes one among many layers of a long-standing, long-evolving, urban landscape.
This is the quiet thrill of Pedestrian Strands. It takes in its surroundings and bounces them back out, only slightly altering them in the process. It amplifies the possibility of a living city, open to interpretation and participation. The artist has said that it “orchestrates the dissonances,” a phrase that seems to strike at the meaning of cities. They are where people gather to exchange ideas and generate new ones, to address their different perspectives, and to come face to face with what they’re not. In that sense, Pedestrian Strands is more a mirror than canvas.
It’s easy to imagine a nighttime traveler driving in out of the countryside, past the billboards for roadside hotels and radio stations, and cutting through downtown on I-670. On the bridges above would be what appear to be billboards. But they never resolve themselves into logos or slogans. Instead, they remain smudges of light, perplexing and profoundly engaging.
