The installation of renowned English artist Francis Cape’s piece Waterline (2006) in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, featured seventeen framed photographs hung above a wainscot of ochre-painted paneling. The photographs were taken in New Orleans on November 6th, 2005, two months after Hurricane Katrina, in the towns of Gentilly and St. Roch in central New Orleans. Cape…
The storm had subsided only recently. The gaping holes in those skeletal furnishings, coated with a sheen of silver as if still soaked with moisture from the floodwater, are tell-tale signs of recent damage. It was only yesterday that someone was sitting in that chair, talking to a friend who was snuggled in the nook…
Cy Morgan: The work in Surviving Sandy feels as though it’s on a couple of different tracks all at once—some things are going in one direction; others are going in another. The work is generally concerned with gravity and the way objects project and resist forces. They also follow different valences that can oppose one…
Born from mounds of matter piled, dripped, and gently sculpted by Bosco Sodi, then left to its own devices to crack, shift, and solidify over time, Untitled evokes both past and future, while arresting one’s attention in the present. Dark rivulets, mountains, and gorges form labyrinths of a scorched post-human earth, or perhaps a distant…
Will Yackulic’s Enigma Variations takes its name and theme from a work of music by Edward Elgar written in 1898-1899. Elgar’s composition of twelve variations on a theme is composed to suggest the personality of a friend, personifying some quirk of character through the texture of music. Similarly, Yackulic’s 24 ceramic vessels—each approximately five inches…
Through a series of inventive and cogent gestures and placements Michael Joo has responded to and shaped the 100-year-old industrial space where Surviving Sandy took place. He incorporates the track lighting installed for the show into his piece Untitled (Impacted). He also lowers the piece an additional five-and-a-half-feet to the same height of the Herkimer…
New York artist Loren Munk’s paintings depict the art world as a series of maps and thought-bubbles. In an interview with Phong Bui, co-founder of the Brooklyn Rail and curator of Surviving Sandy, Munk cites a job at Utrecht Art Supplies as the opportunity that began his research into the connection between the New York…
The Triptych is a cosmology. In spite of its name and the fact that it consists of three conjoined sections, each created by applying cut-outs and painted images onto both sides of 58 successive layers of thick glass pressed together, its basic structure is defined by its recto and verso, the latter of which depicts…
The end of days begins serenely, peacefully. Our rush through history has reached stasis; our glittering creations glibly sparkle, frozen in a time that stretches forever in every direction. Ronald McDonald smiles horribly, welcoming us to an eerie silence. Shangri-la serves Happy Meals. Water begins to seep into this hellacious paradise, slowly at first, steadily…