LOST & FOUND
The Gowanus Canal is a condensed memory, of work, of tugboats and barges, of labor and intense movement. In the water are fragments and pieces of present and past lives.
Lost & Found is a collection of memories. An archive of objects that have significance, both because they are shared by the community that will see this piece every day, and because they are remnants of a history made of transformation and rebirth.
The two pieces consist of flat metal silhouettes arranged in a complex vertical cluster. The shapes are collected from two sources, archival photographs of objects that were lost and then dredged up from the canal, and objects of sentimental meaning contributed by the community. The complex cluster democratizes the content, making no one object or memory more significant than any other. This jumbled shape conceals a secret. By changing your position and looking from specific angles there are tugboat shapes hidden in the voids. These boats, now seldom seen in Gowanus, were once abundant. They moved barges full of the material goods from around the world that supplied Brooklyn. Now a ghostly void cut from the hard metal of memory and change.
The two pieces consist of flat metal silhouettes arranged in a complex vertical cluster. The shapes are collected from two sources, archival photographs of objects that were lost and then dredged up from the canal, and objects of sentimental meaning contributed by the community. The complex cluster democratizes the content, making no one object or memory more significant than any other.
This jumbled shape conceals a secret. By changing your position and looking from specific angles there are tugboat shapes hidden in the voids. These boats, now seldom seen in Gowanus, were once abundant. They moved barges full of the material goods from around the world that supplied Brooklyn. Now a ghostly void cut from the hard metal of memory and change.
This jumbled shape conceals a secret. By changing your position and looking from specific angles there are tugboat shapes hidden in the voids. These boats, now seldom seen in Gowanus, were once abundant. They moved barges full of the material goods from around the world that supplied Brooklyn. Now a ghostly void cut from the hard metal of memory and change.
The sculptures are made from sheets of colored stainless steel in a mirror finish. These sheets are slotted into each other and tabs bent and used to bolt the pieces together. The sheets at the bottom are thicker, the sheets towards the top are thinner and have ‘rigging’ that ties them together.
Lost & Found was a finalist proposal for Gowanus Nevins North LLC & Gowanus Nevins South LLC, 2025