Beautified Landscape | 2013 | pigment print on Phototex | 40 x 60 inches
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Beautification This Site centers on a leftover piece of the landscape I acquired through the Department of Transportation’s Adopt-A-Highway Program. It’s located at exit 30 off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, carved out between a highway exit ramp and a congested Brooklyn street. Part earthwork, part self-assigned residency, the project calls attention to the land itself and ways it is shaped by urban bureaucratic and natural forces, passers-by, and my own endless efforts picking up trash, pulling weeds, and cutting the grass.
The standard issue DOT sign and the labor required of all volunteers (which became a kind of performance for passers-by) were just a part of the project. I also staged subtle interventions on the site in the form of plants and signs, a guided tour, a workshop and a projected slide show for cars stuck in traffic featuring images of trash found on site. Additionally, I made a series of photographs, videos and ephemera focused on ideas of wild spaces, urban places, and land art. Together these resulting works and events elaborated on ideas beyond literal documentation of the place and process and considered multiple meanings projected onto built landscapes, development and ownership, the intersection of individual efforts and civic space, hopefulness and futility, and the open-ended opportunities of interstitial places.
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A Sculpture Made By My Efforts | 2014 | archival pigment print | 20 x 30 inches
Self-Portrait Picking Up Other People’s Trash | 2012 | archival pigment print | 20 x 30 inches
PSA for Passers-by #2 | 2014 | digital video, silent | 57 seconds
PSA for Passers-by #3 | 2015 | pigment print on Phototex | 40 x 60 inches
Wish you were here | 2015 | postcard | 4 x 6 inches
Weedfield–A Confrontation (after Agnes Denes) | 2015 | archival pigment print | 12 x 16 inches
Winter Landscape, Spring Landsape, Summer Landscape, Fall Landscape | 2014 | collaged archival pigment prints | 12 x 16 inches each
Field Studies | 2013-15 | archival pigment prints | 18 x 24 inches each
Installation view from solo exhibition | An earthwork can reveal an invisible landscape and also form an exit ramp, 2016 | Songs for Presidents, Ridgewood, Queens, NY
Workshop documentation | Use Values: Re-imagining Urban Waste, 2015 | two-part workshop in collaboration with Zena Bibler and Juliette Spertus, presented by iLAND
Event documentation | Drive-by Movie: A slideshow for passers-by about what they leave behind on their way to some place else, 2015 | on-site projection during rush-hour traffic
Event documentation | New Year’s Day, 2013 | on-site sign dedication and speech
SPEECH TEXT:
To all who come to this leftover space, or even just pass it by as you exit the highway: welcome.
We are here today to greet a sign, a sign that in turn will greet all who pass this way en route to somewhere else. But of course, this is more than merely a sign, as this land itself is more than just a dumping ground for empty hot sauce packets, bottles of pee, styrofoam packing peanuts, bits of paper, and plastic bags brought by that most careless of passers-by, the wind. And by other careless passers-by. This is a sculpture made from the seemingly endless labor of picking up trash and mowing the grass. Labor that began in the fall and that will continue over the coming year and in all the coming years by those who dedicate themselves and their efforts to the Adopt-A-Highway Program and answer its charge to clean and beautify the arterial highways of our great City and our great Nation.
Flowers will bloom here.
In the words of Miriam from the Department of Transportation, as told to me in an email this past October: “I have been notified by my supervisor that the sign crews have assured her that the volunteer signs will be installed soon.” Well, ladies and gentlemen, it seems that soon–that promise of a future just around the corner, a hope almost within our grasp–soon is upon us. Soon has arrived. Soon is today. Soon is 2013.
Happy New Year.