Editors' note: This story was written for Underwater New York's January 24 event at Winter Shack, a temporary exhibition space designed by Alex Branch and Nicole Antebi, who curate a series of site-specific installations/readings/exhibitions that encourage audiences to engage with one another's work and to build community in the darkest hours of the year.
On 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 MoreI once went to a New Year’s Eve party whose host, a burlesque dancer, handed each guest a dinner plate
to smash against a brick wall. I’ve never seen a roomful of people so suddenly awake, so reborn. Of course,
that was years ago, before we lost Brooklyn, before they came for Queens.
For all the ghost horses haunting Dead Horse Bay, this was made for an Underwater New York event as part of Marie Lorenz's Flow Pool at Recess Art in SoHo, April 21, 2016.
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So it was written: the deeps covered them; they went down into the depths like a stone.
It goes like this. One person was chasing another. The sea split. There was a door. There was a crossing.
From one side to the other. Then the door slammed. It slammed in the face of the chaser. He was hit.
He was sunk. He went down.
1.
pure silver
it only feels right sometimes
when the moon comes in and the concrete
swells like waves
the scent of inland grasses
much sweeter than this sand
sometimes when the summer feels
just so
and the wind catches you
by the ankles
I call out that I’ve found a bone, a spinal vertebra perhaps, and I begin to pull away the seaweed and sand crabs from where the marrow once was. The friend I've brought here appears at my side and I hand him the horse bone. He turns it over in his hand; it looks more like wood than bone from years of being tossed and aged in the bay. We keep pawing through the broken bottles and tinker toys littering the shore and find a very bone looking bone: long and thin in the middle and bulbous on the ends, like a dog toy or a bone you’d see in a cartoon. We are preoccupied with this carnal treasure hunt. We have done the remarkable: we have found a certain joy in death.
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As the title of George Boorujy’s piece, Florida (Hurricane Andrew), underscores, we do not usually expect to see deer in New York City, let alone in the waterways of New York. And yet, in October 2011, three deer were found, frantic, at the foot of the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn, the first seen in the borough in many years.
For all the ghost horses haunting Dead Horse Bay, this was made for an Underwater New York event as part of Marie Lorenz's Flow Pool at Recess Art in SoHo, April 21, 2016.
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I make portraits of phantoms to explore the connections between history, memory, and perception. My choice of materials is often intended to draw attention to the unstable nature of these entities. The unwieldy form of the ghost horse is made out of adhesive and other transparent material. It references the horse refineries that were once prevalent in Dead Horse Bay. The creatures inevitable transformation as it is submerged in water and mingled with other objects is similar to the unpredictable ways we recall the past. Some aspects coalesce while others disappear altogether.
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On 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.
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I read about Dead Horse Bay while researching odd spots in NYC for my blog, This Hidden City. I had to see it for myself, and visited on Halloween, a little after low tide ended. It was a mild, but windy day. I parked too far, and it took forever for me to find an entrance to the bay. While I did take a few photos, I could hardly believe what I had seen. I returned with my girlfriend the following week, at the most extreme low tide. It was a colder, though less ominous day. I knew my way around this time, and did a bit more exploring. These photos are from both visits.
On 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 MoreI carried pails of water once, too.
Seawater, up along the shoreline
to dryer sand. I picked out seaweed and shells.
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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The sorcerer drove too fast. He always did but only because his mind was somewhere else, not because he was in love with speed. He was slow, really—sorcery is not a speedy business. What’s speedy are the events that make sorcery necessary. His mind was on his wife, Mary, who sat day after day at her sewing machine turning out small pink dresses, some trimmed in white eyelet, some in lace. Today he was more distracted than usual, this being the same block he’d been driving down the night he first saw her, a skinny girl wearing glasses, balanced on one leg like a stork. The sycamore trees were taller now, full of nests. A shadow leapt from between two parked cars. It was twilight and the papers on the back seat came flying in a white fan around him.
My brother and I could not agree on how to worship the mouse. It was typical of us back then that we could agree that it should be worshipped—that was obvious from the day it arrived in the mail, a gift from our father, who had been in Vietnam for three years, which was one-third of George’s life and one-half of mine, on business more important than his wife and his sons. The last gift had been a green and yellow straw mat, and we agreed that it was, in fact, a prayer-mat, the use of which only became clear with the advent of the mouse. The evening it arrived we knelt in our room in our pajamas in the dark. George had his flashlight out and he shined it on the mouse’s face.