Carpark

Site specific public art project
inSite '94, San Diego, CA
August 31, 1994
Cars are a defining feature of the landscape and social space of Southern California. Especially in San Diego, where freeways weave like dangerous ribbons through a terrain of strip malls and tract housing, driving is an almost inescapable part of daily life.

Nina Katchadourian, Steven Matheson and Mark Tribe were invited to work collaboratively on a site-specific project at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California for inSite '94, a binational art exhibition that takes place at various locations throughout San Diego and Tijuana.

Southwestern College is surrounded by a moat-like ring of parking lots. You can't enter the campus without crossing a sea of concrete. Each day, Southwestern's 3,477 parking spaces fill and empty several times with the cars of the students, faculty and staff who commute to Southwestern from all over the San Diego and Tijuana area.

On August 31, 1994 from 6am to noon, a team of 50 professional and volunteer parking attendants directed the arriving cars to predetermined lots according to car color. Each of the fourteen lots was filled with cars of a different color: dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic raspberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green and red.

https://www.marktribestudio.com/carpark/