C-print mounted on Plexi, Documentation from project, Brooklyn 2015
Untitled Project
(Rogers avenue, 6 am on a Sunday morning)
Project/photo/text (2015)
In May 2015 I moved my studio from the New York Artist Studio and Residency Foundation to a family shelter in Brooklyn. Together with the temporary residents I set up a number of sculpture workshops in the backyard of the shelter. A mother and her son came to every workshop, week after week. One day I asked the boy, we can call him “J”, where they lived before the came to the shelter.
- Before? We stayed at another shelter in East New York, and before that at another shelter in Flatbush, and before that another shelter, but before that we had a real apartment!
A few days later I talk to his mother and tell her how the story has grown into an idea for a artwork we could do together. The day after we make a cast of the shoulder of “J”. Before dawn on a Sunday morning we go back to the house that they once were evicted from. They haven’t been back in four years. We mount the cast of the shoulder on a wall where “J” could have been hanging out, had he still lived there. The street has changed a lot and the neighborhood has transformed. – This is the height of my shoulder, glue here, he says. His mother and I mount the cast and a small plate with the story. We leave right after dawn and the city awakens.
Above, left: C-print mounted on Plexi, Documentation from project, Brooklyn 2015
Below: The artist book Untitled Project (Rogers Avenue 6 am on a Sunday morning)
