• Tide and Current Taxi: 2024

Jody Graf and I met at the Queens Landing Boathouse for a trip into the Newtown Creek on a beautifully gray day in July.

The wind was perfect for an upstream float.

The tall buildings of Long Island City quickly gave way to gas tanks

and giant arms of the recycling centers at work.

I told Jody everything I knew about the creek, and I was thinking how familiar these sights have become.

Then Jody pointed out something that I never noticed before; a giant rose bush growing happily behind United Refrigeration Incorporated,

and a wonderful mimosa in the J&S Supply parking lot.

I can see why she is particularly attuned.

In 2022 Jody curated Life Between Buildings at MoMA PS1 in Queens, a show that connected the development of community gardens in 1970’s New York to art practices like Cecilia Vicuña and Gordon Matta-Clark’s, who used overlooked and abandoned spaces for performance and installation. [This image is a detail from Cecilia Vicuña’s “Sidewalk Forests” (1981) in the exhibition. Credit: Miles Huston; via Lehmann Maupin Gallery.]

In a beautiful essay about the show, Jody wrote “Look closely at the cracks, the fissures, the gaps, and you might just find something growing there that, in its quietude, speaks volumes.”

We pulled the boat out at Plank Road

and hid it in the bushes.

Passing back over the Kosciusko Bridge, we saw the recycling plant, once again just a small feature on the busy horizon,

 

but it seemed different after being this close.

Here we are at Plank Road after the 3-mile paddle.