United Islands of The East River

Since I moved to Red Hook Brooklyn in 1997 I have been the fishing and swimming and making art about the east river. In the past nine years I have watched the remaining longshoreman disappear and the shipyards make way for luxury condominiums.

In the winter of 2003, I began building boats and venturing out into the east river and it was these journeys that spawned my video installation trilogy, which I refer to as “United Islands of the East River”. In November 2005, I was invited to do a show at Sarah Lawrence College. The show was comprised of the preliminary ideas inspired by these journeys, such as a 30 ft boat frame constructed entirely out of bottles accompanied by a video of me stealing the bottles from an Odwalla distribution center along the east river in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

A series of drawings and tattoos I created during these formative stages were also on display. Many of the re-occurring archetypal images and urban flotsam appear in the work reference historical occurrences and found objects I uncovered in my research.