Jennifer Bolande, Green Curtain (detail), 1982, velvet curtains, spotlights. Installation view, The Kitchen, New York.

Plywood is already like a picture of wood. Richard Artschwager mined this terrain extensively. It exists at a remove from the natural world—it’s almost hard to imagine its relationship to a tree. One of the most prevalent and least expensive of building materials, it’s used for temporary fixes. It conjures various types of disasters that might result in boarded-up windows and doors: floods, fires, closed businesses; damaged, vacant, or foreclosed properties. There can be an aversion to looking at this material and at boarded-up sites in general. It is assumed that we are not supposed to look at something in this state, or that nothing is there.

While the urban landscape—how it is experienced, remembered, and imagined—has frequently figured in my work, this is my first piece sited in public space. The project also marks the first time Los Angeles, my recently adopted home, has had a starring role. New York City—its actual and ersatz monuments, distinctions, and divisions—played a part in a lot of the work I made during the twenty-five years I lived there. For example, the sculpture Hotel [1983] had something to do with reconciling images of the city from a previous era with what I was actually seeing at the time. It was inspired by a scene from the 1933 movie Dinner at Eight that featured a hotel sign glimpsed through a curtained window and also by the many instances of abandoned tenements, boarded up with sheet tin, that I was seeing in the East Village. The experience of cities is always a conflation of the temporal and the spatial. We understand and know them through countless repetitive experiences, as well as through the filters of our memories and projections, but they are constantly changing.

New York and Los Angeles are, of course, experienced in distinctly different ways: New York is a walking city and has much to do with faces, facades, and voyeurism. I remember always looking up at windows and imagining myself in different spaces. Los Angeles, on the other hand, has to do with pathways that are traveled and known but not closely examined, the details and particularities glimpsed in passing. That was what was so great about Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip [1966]: He slowed down and made visible what would not otherwise be seen; he made the street visible as a linear strip, but from the perspective of the street itself. I love works that direct attention to ordinarily overlooked aspects of the cultural landscape.

Curtains are thresholds to other realms, theatrical, public, or private. They are a subset of a more general interest in thresholds (physical, psychological, and temporal) and have been a recurrent motif in my work. My beginnings were in dance and performance art—that might explain some of my attraction to curtains, which sit at the boundary between the audience and the performer. Curtains can signify not only the end but also the beginning of something. They fetishize the moment of expectation: Our projections about what is to come are cast onto this surface, which contains the power to conceal or reveal. My first show set an actual theater curtain beside a still of one taken from a cartoon.

I am a kind of bas-relief artist; my work often hovers between image and object. The experience of embodied understanding is central: To this end, I have used a variety of strategies to bring what is primarily visual back into physical space to elicit an embodied response. Not that this is my ultimate goal, but I imagine that if we were able to put Plywood Curtains into every empty storefront in the city, it would bring a palpable physicality and a commensurate sense of scale to the recession, which can often seem abstract. I envision a number of iterations of Plywood Curtains multiplying throughout Los Angeles, articulating certain corridors of the city and creating a sort of cinematic effect through repetition as you drive by.

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