The Narrows
Beside by Nicole Haroutunian
Artist Statement
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.
About the Artist
Nicole Haroutunian is an editor of Underwater New York. Her bio can be found here.
Descending by Ella Mei Yon Biggadike
Everett’s not asking why anymore. He rubs the wedding band on his finger, shimmies it down to his knuckle, and pauses. The band hovers loosely as he steps closer to the edge of the bridge. He looks over to Staten Island and over to Brooklyn. The adrenaline is numbing. He sticks his hand into the wind and shakes the band free, letting it fall into the blackness. He watches it disappear, wanting to hear it break the water’s surface. This is what he’s gotten himself into. The groove in his finger where the band once was is a smooth valley and it makes him realize she’s carved into him. It reminds him why he is doing this. From behind, the sound of a car horn emerges, as the bridge, brittle, wavers in the wind.
They got the rings on a whim in a tiny little antiques shop in a Long Island beach town two hours from the city. Olivia wanted beach, despite the weather. They were bundled head to toe in a vacation town muffled with snow and finding it difficult to make conversation. Each could imagine the sunshine, spilled ice cream cones, saltwater taffy and amusement park laughter–– mental images that, much like their happier selves, haunted them. They too, had seemed like ghosts of themselves lately, haunting each other.
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