Last Mile

Last Mile documents the disappearing wild spaces and the constructed geometries of real estate development around my home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Utilizing lumen prints, whose attributes are a product of their chemical mixture and environmental interactions, the images in Last Mile describe both the shifting landscape and the print’s own reaction to the environment. Through an obsessive re-mapping of my home, I confront problems of memory and the power of erasure, with fugitive images that parallel the changing terrain. Red Hook exists at the intersection of two powerful interests: commercial enterprises like Amazon who build huge last mile distribution centers and high end luxury real estate development. Each poses a different set of problems for the neighborhood and each has substantially changed the landscape. As a reaction to a series of building demolitions in 2019, and my inability to remember disappeared places, I began making lumen prints in situ by pressing sheets of black and white photo paper against newly erected construction barriers and old overgrown fences, developing a personal way to map the changes in the environment, through a haptic approach.