A collaboration with Proteus Gowanus for TEDxGowanus, Jan 26 2014.
“Life and Death on the Gowanus” pays homage to the multifarious ecological and human dramas played out along the banks and in the murky waters of the Gowanus Canal. The double-sided “broadsheet”, is a collection of actual news stories about things found in and along the Gowanus canal from the late 1800s to the present — including a gangster, horses, a small child, a merman, a whale, a dolphin and a shark.
I collect content for my pieces from sources that range from historical accounts, current environmental concerns, neighborhood issues, to classic cinema. I re-purpose narratives to reveal interwoven relationships between the past and present. My main materials are the stories themselves. Some works are realized as single objects, others as films. There have been gardens, coffee cups, drawings, and even a pile of compost. A playful interaction between content and form is my method for occasioning meaning, interpretation, and irony. Soil, seeds and plants often recur in my work. These are the surplus from metamorphoses in nature in which each new form retains a trace of its history. For me this is an encouraging example of how the past is continually re-integrated, transformed into the present.