Sto Len and Kelie Bowman are artists (music, sound, performance, painting, books, sculpture, and all things in between) who also run the great Cinder’s Gallery in NYC.
Sto’s beautiful aqueous-surface-monoprints have led him to the Newtown Creek.
It seems fitting for him to work in a place where the mixing of oil and water is such a huge issue.
Sto got right to work on our trip into the creek on Tuesday.
I couldn’t believe how well it worked!
The oil stuck right to the paper in amazing forms, just how it looked on the surface of the water,
like microcosms of this distressed landscape.
I knew about a place where there would be lots of good stuff floating on the surface of the water.
The Dutch Kills waterway is like a museum of broken infrastructure.
Junk is left right there until the water takes it,
and soon we saw big swirls of coagulated something on the surface.
Sto was ready to work larger.
The boat became a little printshop,
and we used the rocky bank as a drying rack.
Far into the Kills, someone was tending a beautiful garden.
“Is this where you live?” We asked. “No, it’s just a wood shop,” he answered, “This is where I work.”
There were other people working on the water too, more people than I have ever seen here at one time.
Down at the end, we floated up to one of the massive Combined Sewer Outfalls of the Newtown Creek.
It had rained the night before, and the water was covered with oil and debris from the sewer.
It was almost too gross to print,
so we decided to keep exploring.
We passed a perfect oil slick.
There actually are less of these in the creek than you would think, maybe because of organizations like the Newtown Creek Alliance who are paying such close attention.
Got it!
The crew started to get hungry,
so we looked for some place nicer to stop.
How about the sewage treatment plant?
I know it sounds weird, but the sewer plant’s ‘Nature Walk‘ is a great place to hang out. The park was designed by a long time NYC small boat navigator, George Trakas and he made sure it had a good boat landing.
We sat and watched a bunch of junked cars get loaded into a barge.
“There is so much trash in the world.” said Kelie.”Where does it all go?”
We talked about pollution for a while and it was nice,
After spending the last couple years thinking about ‘Object Oriented Ontology‘, and the importance of things-in-themselves,
I wonder if “thing power” is another fancy way of doing nothing.
“I think people should have to deal with their own trash for one month,” said Kelie.
“It would give people a sense of how much trash they actually make.”
We all agreed.
Sto took the prints back to his studio and worked on them a little more. Some he left exactly as they came out of the water, and some like this one, he worked back into with ink and pigment.
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