Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals

Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals
2018 | mixed media | installation view at Baxter St at CCNY, New York, NY

In this installation of related works, I recreated nautical signal code flags using images I made while wandering the streets of New York City. The flags provide a system of communication understood from a distance, and used when lost at sea or on the sidewalk. Like the flags’ original function, my flags correspond to the alphabet and relay simple, urgent messages such as “You are running into danger” and “I require assistance”—as well as the exhibition’s title Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals.

On a nearby wall, a series of photographs show a lone figure amidst a deserted urban waterfront using these very flags to send quasi-cryptic signals towards the “sea” on the gallery’s opposite wall. My “sea” was a nearly 27-foot long cyanotype mural on fabric made from a series of photographs which alternate images of the city’s solid terrain and the watery landscape that surrounds and defines it. When rendered in the deep blue hues characteristic of the cyanotype process, the surfaces of the river and the street become almost the same. The exhibition considered the precarity of New York City as a series of islands, calling attention to the fluid and tenuous boundary between constructed landscapes and natural phenomena.

Sidewalk Signal Code | 2017-18 | pigment prints on nylon, cotton twill tape | 26 flags, 12 x 15 inches each

Sidewalk Signal Code | detail

I wish to communicate with you | 2017 | archival pigment print mounted on dibond | 20 x 30 inches

I require assistance | 2017 | archival pigment print mounted on dibond | 20 x 30 inches

I am on fire and I have dangerous cargo on board, keep well clear of me | 2017 | archival pigment print mounted on dibond | 20 x 30 inches

S.O.S. | 2017 | archival pigment prints mounted on dibond | 20 x 41 inches

You are running into danger | 2017 | archival pigment print mounted on dibond | 20 x 30 inches

The state of the sea is expected to be… | 2017 | cyanotype on fabric | 24 x 320 inches

The state of the sea is expected to be… | detail