Underwater New York

Beside by Nicole Haroutunian

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Artist Statement

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BESIDE is an edition of 2o. The images are printed with ink on a Gocco B6 press and the text is printed in Futura with East River water on a Chandler & Price Pilot Press. The envelope is handmade and soaked in East River water. Additional text and waves drawn in blue ink were later added to the prints and can be seen here.

When I began BESIDE, I hoped to print on handmade paper created from scraps scavenged from NYC’s riverbanks. But, after a month of walking up and down the Hudson, hopping fences to get close to the East River, I only had collected a scant bagful of scraps—not nearly enough for four prints in an edition of twenty. What better reason to have to reconceive the project, though—the riverbanks just aren’t that dirty anymore. Even when I decided to print using East River water instead, I was amazed that the water I collected, dipped off a rock in Williamsburg, had no discernable smell, no weird cast or color. So, rather than obscuring my images of objects—teredoes and gribbles, shopping carts and grand pianos, ice cream trucks and Formica dinettes, wharf rats and drowned giraffes—the text emphasizes their strange side-by-side presence in the city’s underwater landscape, making their identities all the more clear.

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About the Artist

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Nicole Haroutunian is an editor of Underwater New York. Her bio can be found here.

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Tags: Coney Island Creek, East River, Formica dinette, Giraffe, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Grand Piano, Nicole Haroutunian, Rockaway, Shopping cart, Teredos & Gribbles, The Narrows, Wharf rats