Among The Pilings
Title: Among the Pilings
Medium: Oil on Yupo
Dimensions: 48x60 inches
The image features a bluish figure reclining underwater among the pilings of a pier. A school of fish swim above the figure; at the bottom, to the left, is a skull and to the right, a bell settled into the sand. The scene is painted with loose gestural strokes in a variety of colors with an overall green tint. It is inspired by the mermaid that I imagine occasionally dwells beneath Steeplechase Pier, which happens to be one of her favorite resting places during her travels.
Listen to Whit Harris’s oral history interview, conducted by UNY founding editor Nicki Pombier on February 16, 2022. Read an edited excerpt below.
ON MAKING AMONG THE PILINGS
I feel like I’ve had a series of breakthroughs with bringing together my interest in underwater objects, like the lists that you have on your website, and the stuff that I’m already kind of interested in, preceding the project. But I’ve always been interested in New York, I’ve always been invested in New Yorkness. I want it to be a part of my identity. So, you know, I’m like, Well, what does that look like? And yeah, the waterfronts too, I have that relationship. You know, it was interesting when this was presented, it was like, there’s this whole world underneath the water, underneath the sea, and the Hudson River. I can only imagine the kind of stuff that’s accumulated, the kind of history that stuff tells. So I appreciate the website for that reason. And I was drawn to…the Steeplechase Pier. I think I read it wrong the first time, which made me want to portray the Steeplechase Pier as this thing above water. There already is Steeplechase Pier by Coney Island. I don’t know the exact date when it was redone, but it was pretty recent. It was like falling apart, this pier, and they have redone it, and it’s beautiful now. I’ve been there. But it is replacing this old worn out pier from the turn of the century. So I’m just like, envisioning it…it was an imaginative project because I’m envisioning, like, what is there? I haven’t seen it. I was looking it up, and there is no evidence of an old pier. But I can only imagine that there is, you know, because that’s what we do. We abandon things in the water, and why not? No one’s gonna see it. But it’s there. And that’s interesting to me, you know, to know that this thing is there. I saw other images of things under the water by the pier, like the bell that would ring in a ferry of people traveling interborough. I thought that was really cool. I saw a picture of that. So anyway, I’m just imagining this thing. And imagination is a big part of my practice already. I’m already imagining scenarios and characters. I’ve been on a mermaid kick. So that’s a thing. That’s already a sea thing, already an aquatic sort of figure and I was thinking about ways that those two concepts, this unseen community landmark, if you will, a gathering space, the site with this sort of made up figure, imagined, like almost childish. So I had fun making doodles and thinking about motifs and a sort of bigger vision of what that could look like, you know, really bring that to life.
ON BEGINNINGS
I was born and raised here. New York. And, you know, it’s a city that has its own sort of iconography, but it’s different when you’ve lived in it, experienced it as a kid. There’s a sense of ownership I think I have with the space, you know, maybe a little bit entitled, which may or may not be reasonable. But also, it almost kind of feeds into the mythology of myself, like, what kind of character I’m supposed to embody, what sort of aesthetic that is. It’s like, Nikes, or something, and like, casual wear, you know, it’s fashion-based. It’s also attitude. But, actually, I would say among New Yorkers that that’s not true, that that mask is a part of it, but it’s not who you actually are. There’s also the strong sense of identity with other people in New York, this community, whether you’re from here or not. Whatever that means, because I, too, am a settler. This is Lenapehoking territory that I reside on. I didn’t ask to be here, and they didn’t ask me to be here. So that’s a whole complicated thing, too. But it’s like, alright, well, what do you make of it? So I think that’s a big part of the city. I see that, too, with this project, and that’s a lot of my practice, like, what are you making of this sort of messy, confusing residue. The mess is a big part of it, I think. When I think about the stuff left over under the water, I know there’s a big fucking mess. It’s disgusting under there. I swim in it. I’ve seen it. Like literally and figuratively. I’ve swam in the water. Not the Hudson. I’ve been in a kayak in the Hudson. You know, on Canal Street, you can get in there in the summer. And there’s all kinds of stuff floating in the water. I can only imagine what’s underneath it that’s settling at the bottom. And at the beaches. I’ve been to most of the beaches. Seen some stuff there. Yeah, and people. So mermaids. It just becomes this thing you patch together.
ON EARLY MEMORIES OF WATER
My dad would take us to Riis Beach. Back when he had a car and then when he didn’t, we’d take the bus, and I still go there. We would have family gatherings at the beach. We’d meet our relatives in Queens, so it was almost like a midway point. They’d drive down, we’d drive down and hang out there over by the Rockaways, but like this specific area where the park was because there was handball. So you would have some people on the court because that was really like a thing. People played handball, paddle ball. And then there was the beach and then in between was a grill, you could like, you know, so there’s a lot going on. So there’s always this activity by the water for me, and all good things, rarely bad things, I can’t even think of a bad thing. I really can’t. And everything leading up to it, and the beach smells, like that kind of stuff just lives with you forever. I still go there and think about that. And the iconography there, because there’s this bell tower. And so it was like, alright, well, which side of the bell tower are you on? We’ll go there. Are you on the bathroom side or the other side? I think a big part of it is the sensory thing. I want to say sensual, but it’s not like sexual, it’s just, it’s of the body. And it sort of touches on every part of it. It really grounds you in the space. And you’re not like, at least for me, especially as a kid, I’m not too concerned with everything going on outside of the moment. So that was really awesome. That’s why we go to the beach as adults, you know, so you can be in the moment, outside of our stuff, or responsibilities. And, you know, the sort of like, not fun, mundane life.
ON SIMULTANEITY AND THE SOUP OF TIME
In my process, I do a kind of layering of marks. For a while, I was using a layering of all these different techniques, but right now, centering around this project, I’m thinking about ways I can simplify this concept around time and identity and the markers of different moments or different periods or different perspectives. So I layered the drawing. So I’ll have different elements that come together, like the mermaid or the pier, the wood, worn wood, or even like a wave or like a fish or some sort of residue. I’m just making stuff up. And it’s fun to make stuff up, but I get a little carried away, so I try to give myself rules. You know, I want to find the edges, but it’s like, Alright, hold on, let’s just make something. So I like take all these different elements and try to bring them together in a way that they are, like, distinguishable but also kind of messy, like memory, you know, like recollection and even a moment, even living in the present, where there’s a simultaneity of experiences and visual cues. I’ve been in New York my whole life, and I’ll leave, I’ll come back, and it’s just, there’s so many visual cues. I’m always swimming in this soup of time. It’s like the past, it’s the future. It’s really kind of bizarre, you know? It’s very dense.
ON WORKING WITH COLOR
I don’t do a lot of color in my work. Color had left my life a long time ago. That’s not actually what I mean. It’s more like, I always think of it as a protest. A little bit of a protest. [I stopped using color] maybe three years ago. It was before the pandemic. It wasn’t pandemic-related, but maybe I was onto something. Honestly, I think a lot of it was that color was a big distraction for what I was trying to do as far as condensed time and a lot of mark making, a lot of variation of mark making. I thought color would have been too much of a distraction, at least for me, in making it. And then I thought about what color meant. So I’ve been using it for a little bit, you know, really strong primary colors, really bright. Almost like washed out colors and high contrast to kind of make it look almost fake, like it was a fake kind of a joy. And then I just working with black and white. Or black ink. And charcoal drawing materials. I’ve been really drawn to work on paper. And so with Among the Pilings, I was actually thinking about how color could be useful, and maybe introducing one or two limited colors to get a sense of that underwater. You know, green, that sort of swimmingness, that sort of saturation that happens when you’re immersed. I don’t know yet. It’s very spontaneous, you know?
Object
Steeplechase Pier, Dreamland Bell, Bell, Mermaid
Body of Water
Coney Island
About the Artist
Whit Harris (b. 1985) makes surreal figurative drawings, paintings, and sculptures in monochromatic or limited color palettes. Her recent exhibitions include “We Were Never Gone” at Hauser & Wirth in New York, and “Flesh and Time and Bread and Friends” at Galerie Christine Mayer in Munich. She was selected as an Artist in Residence at Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut. Whitney earned an MFA from Hunter College and a BA from Stony Brook University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.