In Bushwick, Brooklyn, empty and overgrown spaces lurk almost everywhere. These urban nether-worlds hide behind fences and walls, and sometimes in plain sight; we tend to move past without taking notice. Since I moved here in 2004, I've had to work without the vistas and architectural grandeur of my old neighborhood. Bushwick forced me to look closely, sometimes through chinks in fences or at the pavement under my feet. I've since been seduced by the surprises I find here, like the curious cast-offs of local culture and the relentless thriving of flowers and weeds.
These photographs document ten years of exploration. TheyÕre the product of my search for a sense of placeÑphysical, cultural, emotionalÑin my generally desolate surroundings.
In the early Nineteen-nineties I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, in a landscape at turns overgrown and barren. New England row houses abutted empty lots, crumbling husks of factories, and a dizzying web of trees, weeds, cyclone fences, and high tension wires. Layers of growth and decay confounded attempts at easy interpretation. The landscape might have been formed by a simple mix of accident and neglect, but it felt to me like the work of a larger process. I saw a kind of unconscious synergy in the acts of people, nature, and erosion that had shaped these spaces over many years. When I moved and continued the project in an industrial section of Brooklyn, the mix of these elements changed, but the underlying feeling stayed the same. There was more to see beyond the garbage, disorder, and desolation.
I titled the work WildernessÊin response to these impressions. The word has meant different things to different cultures over the years, but has usually carried a sense of mystery, of otherness, and of escape from the borders of the comfortable and the known. The Wilderness has been a place that we feared but at the same time longed for, often with a sense that there, away from the safety and attachments of our everyday lives, we might somehow find ourselves.
