Friday, April 22, 2011

Water Week


During the New School’s Water Week, in March 2011, students in Waterlogged and Restoration Ecology classes lead tours tracing the paths of three buried streams: Minetta Brook, Sun Fish Pond and Collect Pond and Stream. Along the way, the students presented their research on the history of the waterways, the impacts these streams and the surrounding geography have had on urban forms, and restoration case studies.

A PDF of the booklet they created for the tours is available to download here.

Sun Fish Pond Tour







Minetta Brook Tour









Collect Pond and Stream Tour








The tours ended where each stream once connected to the river.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Rena Lee - prints!



Parallel sidewalks border a road flowing towards a turning point at the end of a narrow street, congested with cars looking for diverse cuisines on either side. Aimed at the same general direction is the elevated path of the LIRR. Riders and pedestrians criss-cross to and from the same points within their bounded paths, while simultaneously creating shifting boundaries for cars and for each other. Repetitive sounds of train tracks, car engines, station announcements are interrupted by occasional street chatter and loud heels on the cement and cobblestone pavement. The point of convergence seems to be beyond a brand-new development called “NEW WORLD MALL”. This narrow street is not ready for more people as cars and pedestrians barely navigate past each other now without brushing, but relentless commercial development projects are slated for the coming years. The interactions between paths are slated to become chaotic, overrun by traffic, not only at the intersection of Prince Street and 40th Rd, but throughout this lovely little town called Flushing.
converge     diverge      intersect      restrain      release      meander      fade

Moving from the bottom up towards the right, a gradual increase in darkness and openness can be seen. The congestion of cars and pedestrians is most extreme in the large plate, where there is hardly any white space left and the leaves imprinted by soft ground overlap and touch each other, as well as the boundaries set by the pedestrians criss-crossing on sidewalks. The paths of people constantly jay-walking across the congested streets is shown by the splotchy flows of sugar-lift, increasingly sporadic and heavily-used as the restricting dominance of cars decreases though there’s always a residue of sounds and soot. The resulting plates were not what I had in mind really; every iteration brought unexpected prints with varying lights and darks due to experimenting with pressures and etching times as well as mixing up plate placements. It was really a process of seeing how different methods of etching interacted over iterations and since my original goal was to show interactions of paths and boundaries, with people meandering like water through the streets, there was lots of uncertainty in what results would come of these many interactions. Overall, I’m satisfied with the final plates and prints (but I’ll probably layer on more outside of class to experiment more with sugar lift and aquatint).
converge      intersect      overlay     redirect      weave      meander      release 

Erica Schapiro-Sakashita's Prints



Mikaela Kvan's prints



Hannah Kramm Print Series




.......The location this series is inspired by is the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn......


I would like to experiment with a series of three small plates arranged horizontally but with space between. These will be registered off one another and printed on single pass through the press as one image. The spaces between the plates can serve as a metaphor for the passing of time, and of hidden elements that get forgotten with history, as well as a reference to the physical, as bridges spanning a body of water separating it into sections.

The printing process is similar to geological time, layers corrosion and wear make a complete image after the many steps of process line up on top of eachother. This series focuses the concepts of Wear, Erosion, Accumulation, Trapping and Scraping, because of the endless flow and motion over a surface of water through time.