From Here
From Here is a work cycle composed in three parts: a video-essay; a series of still photographs; and a found story from the archives of the New York Historical Society. The theme is rooted in questions of how identity is produced in connection to place and amid different, and at times clashing, perspectives and ideologies—and how the local or the individual can be manifested within it. The work unfolds on Manhattan's Upper East Side around the coinciding themes along one block and in dialogue with one person’s connection to it.
Five-Minute Walk, 2017
HD-video with sound, 22’24’’
Vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/244062106
The essay film Five-Minute Walk is based on a walk with a native New Yorker—from East 83rd Street to the East River. On this familiar stretch, a reflection on place occurs, which is later processed and re-enacted in three different voiceovers. Different voices, perspectives, and contexts encounter and challenge one another. The sound melds with cinematic observations of street, street corners, park, esplanade, and the river. Questions about individual presence, performance, chance, and memory pose themselves in the spoken texts and images.
Five-Minute Walk-Script for threee voices, 2017
Installation view at Coalmine, Raum für zeitgenössische Fotografie, Winterthur, Switzerland, 2017
Photographic series Walk-Up / Table with archival materials Spite House (New York Historical Society)
Walk-Up (No. 1–24), 2017
Photographic series, inkjet-prints, 21.5” x 14.3” (36.5 x 55cm), Edition: 5
In Walk-Up, the window in all its possible mutations presents itself as the subject of a photographic series. While the window displays itself, it also acts as a mirror of the city. The photographs were taken on and around East 83rd Street. These are the windows of the old walk-up buildings on the Upper East Side—surfaces marked by time, transformed architectural elements, ornaments, air conditioners. They speak of adjustments and resilience while also—through their unplanned aesthetics—function as self-sufficient and self-absorbed images. The photographs are also documents of a disappearing architectural style, and a disappearing New York.
Spite House (photograph from the New York Historical Society)
Spite House, 2017
Materials from the archive of the New York Historical Society
Spite House is an adapted story from the New York Historical Society that connects to the subject of dwellings and the window—and also points to an early real-estate war. The story is told through archival documents: On the Northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and East 82nd Street, two landowners battled over a stretch of land in the late 19th century. The dispute was over the access to the view on Lexington Avenue, the new traffic artery in Manhattan. Joseph Richardson refused to sell his land along the Avenue for the price offered. Instead, he built his own narrow house—for spite—and by doing so obstructed the view of the neighboring building. Richardson lived in the narrowest building in Manhattan until his death.