“Imagine More Sky” began with a painting by Marc Handelman that was included in an exhibition organized by Aaron Gemmill, which took place at Prem Krishnamurthy's exhibition space during Summer 2016. Handelman’s original painting appropriated and altered a digital rendering of a new building at 470 4th Avenue in Brooklyn—a low-quality, new development that has driven up rent and created housing pressure in the neighborhood. As an anti-architectural proposal, the painting erased the developer’s digital fantasy of new construction with oil-painted blue sky and clouds. This light gesture of redaction offered a form of optimistic speculation. It might not halt the development of the building or rising rent prices on 4th Avenue, but as an act of imagination, the painting suggested an alternative future to the version being sold by a developer’s rendering.

For the project at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Handelman, Gemmill, and Krishnamurthy have collaborated to turn this painting into a performative gesture with wider application. The classic technique of “matte painting,” used before CGI on film sets to paint in a background that is too expensive to build or paint out an existing element from the scene, helps here to undo the Photoshop fantasies of architectural rendering. Housed in a portable frame, a painted Plexiglass panel with blue sky can be overlaid on existing Works in Progress signs to block out offending buildings. Directed ultimately towards the fantastic images that compose such posters—which, like an iterative code, combine beautiful stock imagery of sky with clean modernist renderings—”Imagine More Sky” pits one displaced image technology against another. Captured in a photograph, the project suggests the repeatability of this guerrilla gesture within a broader context.

In contemporary New York, rampant over-development with its accompanying downsides seems inevitable. Accepting the potential futility of significantly altering this trajectory, this piece suggests that the first change may be one within the future-looking image itself. Any architectural or civic construction begins with projections and mutations of the real world to prefigure reality. Even in-construction visions can give way to other, bluer sky alternatives.