Crip’d Fleets: Overflows + Disruptions, 2021 Triennial Iteration

Crip’d Fleets: Overflows + Disruptions by moira williams

Crip’d Fleets: Overflows + Disruptions is a multi-platform on-going work centering cross disability people, “access intimacy”  and water intimacy asking: ask: “How can the interconnected ecologies of “access intimacy” and water intimacy inform and shape NYC’s Waterfront plans into policies that include accessible ways to the water for and with NYC’s Cross Disability community?”

Access to NYC’s public waterways and accessibility for disabled people to public waterways rarely mean the same thing. Disability Justice believes in looking beyond ADA accessibility and architectural accommodation. Mia Mingus, a Disability Justice scholar and activist coined the phrase “access intimacy” that describes accessibility beyond ADA as an  attitude; “that hard to describe feeling when someone else  ‘gets’ your access needs.” Crip’d Fleets Overflows + Disruptions supports this understanding of accessibility as an attitude, a necessary adaptability best expressed in spaces with flexible boundaries, overflowing, disrupting and messy edges.

Towards expanding access as an attitude, a necessary adaptability shared with water; Crip’d Fleets: Overflows + Disruptions collectively navigates waterfront accessible points across NYC to be with water and co-create virtual and physical performances, conversations, Access Orange Accessible Water Intimacy Point Flags and a Disability Cabaret on an accessible Boat! 

moira’s co-creative work is embodied research towards co-creating, negotiating waterfront planning policy and making accessible waterfronts and beaches. 

Waterfront Access Mapping: Wayfinding wellness along the edge by Zoey Hart

Waterfront Access Mapping: Wayfinding wellness along the edge by Zoey Hart

Waterfront Access Mapping: Wayfinding wellness along the edge. Both A folding pocket manual and virtual media document, waterfront access mapping is an interactive criticism and re-imagining of waterfront wayfinding by, for and with disabled bodies.

Estuarial Council of the Weeds Hand Roll

Estuarial Council of the Weeds Hand Roll by andrea haenggi 
A somatic sensuous outdoor gathering near the water’s edge on Governors Island. Together we will witness and participate in the unrolling of the Estuarial Council of the Weeds Hand Roll and hear from seaweed bladderwrack,the speaker of the Council. Then, collectively, the audience, performer EPA agent andrea haenggi, Maho Ogawa and bladderwrack will bring the roll into the gallery where it will hang for the duration of the Triennial Exhibition. The Hand Roll is a proclamation documenting the first official actions of the Estuarial Council of the Weeds, which invited the NYC Mayoral Candidates to a meeting on the shoreline of Marsha P. Johnson State Park in Brooklyn on the Summer Solstice.

WoWHaus WaterFalls

WoWHaus Waterfalls by sTo Len and the WoW team 

A large scale printmaking installation created with debris picked up around Governors Island and water from the Buttermilk Channel. Inspired by a recurring dream of a flooded house, the scroll-like prints and long flowing fabrics fall out of the windows of Works On Water’s residency building. The prints themselves act as a visual language that decodes the familiar shapes of common trash that washes up on our shorelines well as the natural patterns that water creates while referencing the aesthetic signaling of squats and banner dropping.

Long Distance Dedication (Now On With the Countdown)

Long Distance Dedication (Now On With the Countdown)
by Nancy Nowacek and Carlos Alomar

This 2-channel sound sculpture expresses the uncertainty, grief, and tumult of our present moment through appropriated background vocals from 1970s pop songs, written during a similar time of political, social and environmental upheaval. A Greek Chorus for the earth herself, it serves as a collective voice for the more-than-human world who bears witness to the rapidly escalating effects of climate change and the political agendas determined to disavow it.

Proximity Study (Sight Lines)

Proximity Study (Sight Lines) by Elizabeth Webb 

Proximity Study (Sight Lines) is an attempt to measure closeness despite temporal distance. My grandfather (whom I never met) worked as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn waterfront for 37 years. From Governors Island, I am able to look directly at his place of work; many years ago, he would have returned my gaze from the other side. I filmed the docks with 16mm and rowed in the channel between these two locations. The film print trailed behind the boat, tracing our route, recording our sight lines, and reaching to bridge the distance across the channel. Yet, the longer we rowed, the more the water erased the image.

Special thanks to Julia Sharpe, Marie Lorenz and the Tide and Current Taxi.

CHONY

CHONY by Scott Szegeski

CHONY was built 50 years ago in Sheepshead Bay, and is a lake sailor, due to the smaller keel size and low draft depth making it possible to clam, fish and explore the shallow back bays of long island. My plan is to take chony around governor's island and record what the environment around us. I will use my main artistic medium of gyotaku printmaking to build a large scale "display" to show these prints. The display will be made of koji paper prints of different parts of CHONY, and found objects salvaged while exploring the island.

Fouling Communities

Fouling Communities by Perrin Ireland 

Fouling Communities is a visual study of the marine invertebrates populating Buttermilk Channel and broader New York Harbor. Based on research by students at the Harbor School, this work explores the building patterns of soft bodies through mixed media on paper, canvas, and mylar. 

The animals included are sometimes referred to by science as being members of “fouling communities” because of the way they “colonize” man-made structures in bodies of water like piling, ship hulls, and marinas. These paintings examine soft tissue communities expanding and iterating themselves.

tidewater studies

tidewater studies by Tyler Rai 

tidewater studies is an invitation into observance of the tides and ecological time. The piece is built in relationship to the rising and falling of the day’s tides with three distinct engagements that occur in accordance with high, mid, and low tide. An audio piece, performance, and video projection invite viewers into the tidal present while speculating the changing shorelines of the future.

Engagements:

3:00pm Audio Score - along the shore (1)

5:30pm Performance - under the arch (2)

9:00pm Film Screening - at the water's edge (3)

Much of this work was conceived in dialogue with others: Thank you to everyone who visited the studio, including Marion Spencer, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Carolyn Hall. Big thanks to Benedict Kupstas and Tatyana for sound contributions, Ethan Woods for sound contribution and engineering, Brighid Greene for the short film and conversation, Karinne Keithley Syers and Hannah at Looky Here for printing the visual score. Additional thanks to Matt Evans whose music accompanies the performance and film screening. Many thanks to the Kennicott Glacier, Buttermilk Channel, and the Works on Water community for the opportunity to engage with water and with each other.

clepsydra

clepsydra reimagines this ancient timekeeping mechanism in modern materials. An ancient time-measuring device, a clepsydra functions by measuring the flow of water from one chamber into another. Used around the world in many iterations, a clepsydra (the ancient Greek name) was originally designed to be independent from that which was visible or invisible because of shifting weather and atmospheric conditions (i.e. sun, moon, stars clouded over). A water clock relies on the interaction of gravity, pressure, and geometry. 

clepsydra relies on water collected from the harbor in which Governors Island is located. Installed within the WoWhaus, Clepsydra measures the passage of twelve hours. As the water drips from the top chamber to the bottom, drawings incised into plexiglass emerge, refract, disappear, and layer onto each other.

Fall (2021), a split channel video, combines animation and text to meditate on time, loss, gravity, and breath. The stop-motion animation comprises over 900 prints, whose images range from birds, angels, numbers, moons, and figures from art history. The images morph into each other, transfiguring themselves. Traces of past images makes visually apparent the notion that time layers on itself constantly. Fall weaves through mythic stories, history, and contemporary news in an attempt to make sense of the present  一 a period of enormous, incalculable loss. From a single copper plate whose surface evolved over hundreds of impressions, the prints use various printmaking techniques such as drypoint, caran d’arche crayons, aquatint, stencils, and ghost prints to achieve a delicate quality of touch. 

Grieving Angels (2021) is a series of intaglio prints that plays with a unique symbolic language that reminds us that grief has and will exist forever. Within the series, there are seven compositional types, yet each print is unique. Each print contains nine plates 一 an angel framed by eight shaped plates. The angels are copies of those Giotto painted in the Scrovegni Chapel in the 14th century. Devastated by the crucifixion, their faces and bodies contort in response to their grief over Christ’s death. Alternately reminiscent of stained glass windows and religious architecture, the series calls to mind faith-based practices of grieving. The cyanotype chinecolle pieces contain images of seagulls, numbers, weather patterns, airplanes, x-rays of teeth, falcons, and hazes of blue/purple/cyan. A suggestive 一 yet elusive 一language of loss emerges.

www.kate-liebman.com
@kateliebman5000