The series of drawings Big Apple's puzzles was begun during a three-month stay in New York in 2012 thanks to a grant from the Paris FRENCH INSTITUTE (HORS LES MURS PROGRAMME).
This series is a work in progress and the aim is to draw a sequence of 49 "snapshots" of New York associated to 49 highly elliptic texts (each two or three lines long), kinds of haiku poems in English.

While wandering through the city (Big Apple), I was struck by the architecture and the people (Occupy Wall Street was still in the news). Deeply impressed by the grid patterns of the streets and glass skyscrapers, the diffracted reflections that artificial lighting only served to amplify, I attempted to  recreate this fragmented identity.

In this kind of transparent and colourful puzzle, people follow their solitary paths. Most are on the move, but a few are motionless, lying asleep on the pavements. The drawings evoke this assembling of undulatory fragments, this Big Apple puzzle, in which human forms eventually merge and disappear.

The use of the black and white refers to New York's musical history, as one of the capitals of jazz (Harlem), closely linked to that of slavery and racial segregation between whites and blacks in the US.

Black ultra fine point permanent marker; 70 g US Letter size notepad (21,6x27,9cm), ruled with margin; negative inversion process of the drawings with Photoshop; printing on A4 paper.

Clara Maïda, June 2014