Since I moved to Red Hook Brooklyn in 1997 I have been the fishing and swimming and making art about the east river. In the past nine years I have watched the remaining longshoreman disappear and the shipyards make way for luxury condominiums. In the winter of 2003, I began building boats and venturing out into the east river and it was these journeys that spawned my video installation trilogy, which I refer to as "United Islands of the East River". In November 2005, I was invited to do a show at Sarah Lawrence College. The show was comprised of the preliminary ideas inspired by these journeys, such as a 30 ft boat frame constructed entirely out of bottles accompanied by a video of me stealing the bottles from an Odwalla distribution center along the east river in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. A series of drawings and tattoos I created during these formative stages were also on display. Many of the re-occurring archetypal images and urban flotsam appear in the work reference historical occurrences and found objects I uncovered in my research.
Belmont Island SMEAC
Belmont Island is a pile of rocks with little vegetation, 15 by 30 feet long, situated on the East River across from the United Nations. The area was under 24-hour surveillance during the Republican Party Convention of 2004. The Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration, Command Control (SMEACC) project combines perception of danger, disobedience, and law enforcement.
Individual behavior, trying to reclaim the island back into the public domain by raising a flag, is shown in conflict with institutional fear, because of a primal critical instinct against organized dominance and its systematic efforts to controlæ against all forms of structured command and supremacy. The project was documented through a low-light raw video presented to the viewer in a standard military operation format, by way of organizing debriefings: Two Wagner scores were selected from separate periods. The first was composed while under the influenced of the fascist ideas of Schopenhauer, and the second under the more anti-establishment influences of Nietzsche.
By the Dawn's Early Light, 2007