Hammocks, Stoops & Feathers
with N. Janak and M. Nagura
Hammocks, Stoops & Feathers was a project completed in 2009, documenting the remnant landscape of the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans - 3 years after Hurricane Katrina.
Born out of a triad of obsessions, this exhibition began as a theoretical dissection of movement, congregation and interaction. Over the course of our explorations, some elements manifested into physical and tangible representations (stoops), some straddled the physical and ephemeral (feathers) and some simply became an abstraction of concepts (hammocks).
Having spent a semester in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, we began to discern connections between our obsessions and the neighborhood which is itself floating somewhere between historical past and an uncertain future. The 192 stoops documented tell a story of the interweaving of culture and history, the remnants of houses lost and the temporary avian habitat that currently occupies these spaces.
Hammocks, Stoops and Feathers is a personal response to these physical remnants which are capable of capturing the imagination and transporting one between what was, what is and what may come. Removed from their context, these objects are only amalgamations of materials, yet their symbolic power still suggests transition, connection and the promise of enclosure
