Well then down you go. Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.
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New York is a city of nooks and crannies, discovered and undiscovered, above and below the waterline. Years of industry and years of the collapse of that industry have left much of the city ringed in relics: sunken piers, cement edifices, twisting metal. Recent times have seen much of the coastline reclaimed by municipal projects and developers, much more remains as it had been. And whatever the changes on the shore, it seems likely that the oil-slick surfaces of inlets like Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal will hold onto their mysteries for much, much longer. All of this is worth investigating, and worth documenting along the way.
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Carcasses is about the various cars that have come to their final resting place in the waters surrounding New York City. The movement of the car-shaped plexiglas pieces strung together as a mobile is how I like to imagine these cars slowly sinking down to the bottom.
Read MoreLost boy,
Shipwreck in my life.
When your little hand found mine,
Suddenly
We were home,
You and I,
Meant to be
Tied with a seemingly tenuous knot,
Not of blood or biology
Read MoreOn the small kitchen table lay a set of objects: a vial of pills that looked prescription but bore no prescription; the scuffed cover of a punk CD of unknown origin; and one of the manuals, the writing on its cardboard cover Sharpie-scrawled and illegible. Like the pills, it had arrived from her mother the previous day. Vera Schiele Obek stood over it all, eyeing the items and wondering what the coming voyage would hold.
Read MoreWhen the greenish lights hit the smoke rising from the DJ booth, it formed a noxious cloud. If you dance inside it, you die, Alice decided. They were there at the behest of someone called Darien, a stick figure given life and stringy black hair. Elyse had sent him for drinks.
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Editors' note: Scrap Dive is an exhibit created by graduate student Margaret C. Argiro for "The Social Hall: An Oral History Exhibit" at Columbia University on May 1, 2014. For Scrap Dive, Margaret drew on oral history interviews conducted with Ed Fanuzzi from October 2013 - March 2014, as well as photos and objects from his personal collection. This post is a digitized version of the exhibit.
Read MoreI took the sea to the C
searching for ghosts at Dead Horse beach
a ship appeared to me
I swam out so I could see
"Come aboard my darlin
it's the last time I'll be callin
come aboard and sail with me."
Read MoreWatching the construction downtown from my roof
Allyson says it’s a fish decomposing:
the spotlights a spine
the floors rib bones piling up across the river.
Read MoreI carried pails of water once, too.
Seawater, up along the shoreline
to dryer sand. I picked out seaweed and shells.
From our beginning we've been joined, eager to take up the same space, breathe the same air. In our mother, we acted as one. We were almost born stacked, though that couldn't be. Instead we felt a moment of brief separation, a fissure. When the doctor plucked me from my mother, I reached out for my sister. I had never felt alone.
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Mary Mattingly is a photographer and sculptor based in New York. Mary just completed “Waterpod," a floating sculptural eco-habitat in the New York Waterways, where she lived this summer. In 2009, she exhibited her work at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Tucson Museum of Art, and “Nomadographies” at Robert Mann Gallery, in 2008, she exhibited “Fore Cast”, a multimedia opera at White Box in Manhattan, in 2007: “Frontier” with Galerie Adler in Germany, and “Time Has Fallen Asleep” at the New York Public Library. In 2006 her photo work headlined “Ecotopia , the triennial at the International Center of Photography.
Read More—The only men I admire are suicides, I repeated, as the Turk looked away, or not away but rather past me, the Turk was frequently looking past me, his thoughts seeming to drift like the wisps rising from his meerschaum pipe’s slow-burn—only to wheel back when I least expected and fix me with a gaze of redoubled intensity. In the morning on rising, I immediately drank the cup of black coffee and smoked both of the cigarettes allotted me by the Turk, then lay back in my berth and stared through the porthole at the sun’s perplexing diffractions for several hours before the Turk requested I join him above.
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Photos by Elizabeth Albert, who joined fellow UNY contributing artist Marie Lorenz on a Tide and Current Taxi excursion to College Point, Queens.
Francis Estrada and Wo Chan were inspired to create their drawing and poem, respectively, by the tragic 1994 shipwreck of the Golden Venture, a vessel smuggling people from China that ran aground on the Fort Tilden beach in the Rockaways, killing ten migrants. Buy a copy of this broadside here.
This body of work required a search for something real and sustainable both in the physical construction of the work and the images I chose. The image of the shipwreck became a tangible object as a metaphor for our fragile state as a society. The appeal of these large, well constructed, man-made objects came from their use as war tanks.
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These two prints are from a series made from objects that I find while exploring in my boat. In some ways I think of printing washed up debris as another way to collaborate with the tidal currents in the harbor. The harbor takes all these objects and sucks them in, then redistributes them around the shore according to weight, shape and density. Then I come along and do something else with them.
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I was an ambassador once—of a small African nation. All of us diplomats, that is our dream: to be an ambassador. At least once, at least for a little while. Many of us get a little Eastern or African nation for a year or two. We are eager when it happens because our life’s goal is complete. But it isn’t so special after all. Soon it’s over and we continue on.
1. Pollution of coastal waters can have / the black sun of melancholy/signature of all things I am here to / test for indicator organisms such as / Love or Phoebus, Lusignan or Biron / based on weekly or fortnightly water sampling
A man on a park bench then another man next to him.
The first man there for no good reason.
The other man the kind of man who sits next to strange men on park benches.
This other man has with him a toy airplane.
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