Piece Title: Channel
Date: June 8th, 2024- May 3rd 2025
Opening Reception: June 8th, 2024 5-8 pm
Show Title: Water Stories
Water Stories invites audiences to immerse themselves in the poetic essence and ecological significance of water. The exhibition highlights stories of our local waterfronts, coastlines and waterbodies and places them in conversation with global narratives, historical legacies, and imagined futures.
Venue: BioBAT Art Space
Curator: Elena Soterakis
Team: Elizabeth Hénaff, Heather Parrish, Léonard Roussel, and Seth Wenger as Scope Collective
Additional Contributions: Xena Petkanas (lighting design), Helen Rubinstein (creative writing + audio), Karolina Sulich, Caroline Chou (sludge wrangling, installation)
Summary: CHANNEL is the culmination of environmental sampling, bioinformatic analysis, field recording, multi-scale media generation, and waiting for things to grow. Multiple channels of media and materials are imagined around, and accompanied by water and living sediment harvested from the tidal system defined by the ebullient Gowanus Canal as it merges with the Bay Ridge Channel.
Description: This work emerges from the remarkable microbiome inhabiting the Gowanus Canal’s contaminated sediment. Over many decades of deposited manufacturing waste, these microorganisms have evolved to remediate our toxic trace. The federally subsidized cleanup plan currently underway is to dredge what toxic sediment can be removed and cap the rest with concrete. This intervention will suddenly disrupt the long evolved metabolisms which led to the microbial remediation.
This piece offers egress from our anthropocentric perspective of contaminated vs. natural environments, a human exercise in channeling microbial life. How might we develop unexpected sensitivities and responsibilities towards the often overlooked actors and agents of our intersecting environments – the microscopic, the nonhuman, the nonliving? Here we construct a space for contemplation of these hard to see but vibrant cohabitants, through slow growth and high-resolution documentation.
Materials: Photographic inkjet prints, salvaged architectural iron, steel, concrete, glass containers, recycled fabric, time-lapse video, photographic image projection, spatialized audio.
all photos Stefan Hagen unless otherwise noted
Installation View
Detail View
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Process
all photos Elizabeth Henaff unless otherwise noted
