NEW TOWN (2021-ongoing)

New Town explores the murky boundaries between human aspiration and ecosystem, and our capital imbalance with nature as resource. This is a story spun along Newtown Creek, a four-mile estuary and Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site separating Brooklyn from Queens, blocks from where I lived for close to a decade. Once a fertile stream, channelization for commercial port traffic made it one of the most utilized—and polluted—industrial sites in the United States. Here, ecology meets manufacturing, oil refineries and spills, waste transfer and metal scrapping, placemaking and remediation, and—with a new wave of development—the loaded promise of renewal. 

Working between genres of magical realism and ecological noir, I seek visual expressions of the uncanny to raise questions of a recognizable future. Though these pictures were made at a particular location, this story is not site-specific. New Town is our town—an enmeshed cosmos where everything coexists, where permanent plastics swim with the fish, where humanity produces to consume and humans consume to live, and beauty remains in the unviable breakdown. I aim to make open images from this place of affection, imagination, and acknowledgement. 

Please click on the image links below to view the portfolio of this body of work as well as documentation of exhibitions and publications.

EXHIBITIONS
2022 New Town, Ampersand, Lawrence, KS (Solo)
2022 Dollars and Sense, Rosalux Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
2022 What on Earth is Happening?, Mary R. Koch Arts Center, Wichita, KS (Juror: Bill McBride)
2022 Context 2022, Filter Space, Chicago, IL (Juror: Frances Jakubek)

PUBLICATIONS
2022 Dollars and Sense Zine Vol II, RoseBramble Books, Minneapolis, MN

RESIDENCIES
2021 International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York (June - August) (began work while in residence)

PRESENTATIONS
2022 PhotoLucida Portfolio Walk, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR