#Miska Draskoczy

[gowanusnightheron]

GOWANUS NIGHT HERON CASE STUDY: Gowanus Street Medley (found objects, locally sourced native wildflowers, velvet board, mylar) On a full length walk of Gowanus, one finds many treasures strewn about, left to rust, rot or wash away. From this industrial mat sprouts an improbable shock of colorful wildflower, bound to velvet night by a mylar wind. Suspended between are marine dreams of the great schools returning, lured and caught by surfaces brightly painted. As an avid outdoorsman living in the big city, Miska Draskoczy’s photography often investigates the overlap between the man-made and natural worlds. His photography has been widely exhibited in the US and abroad and is the recipient of numerous awards. His urban wilderness series, Gowanus Wild, was published as a photobook in conjunction with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy and has been exhibited as a solo show at The Brooklyn Public Library and various galleries as well as in group shows such as THE FENCE at PHOTOVILLE. His work has been featured in the press by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Time Out, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Magazine and many others as well as collected by institutions such as the Brooklyn Public Library, MoMA Library, Tufts University, and the Fitchburg Art Museum. Miska is also a co-founder of Gowanus Night Heron, an artist run event collective committed to producing group art happenings that engage both artists and the public in unique and unusual ways. miskadraskoczy.com https://www.instagram.com/miskamagic/ info@miskadraskoczy.com

All Case Study artist boxes are available to purchase for $150 at the Gowanus Open Studios event. Or email gowanusnightheron@gmail.com for availability and sales info.

[muybridgeshorse]

Miska Draskoczy

[fishstickmonkey]

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild

(via Hyperallergic)

[kafkasapartment]

Night Blossoms, 2013. Miska Draskoczy. Pigment print

[yuchenchiu]

Summertime, show time! Please join me tomorrow (6/27) for the opening reception of The Exhibition Lab Exhibition @foleygallery . I am honored to exhibit my photo series "AMERICA SEEN", along with these great photographers: Jennifer Baumann, Pratya Jankong, Rachel Beamer, Paul B. Goode, Frank Mullaney, Michael Meyer, Miska Draskoczy, Kerry Kolenut, Elizabeth Panzer, Peter Schafer and Miles Kerr. Hope to see you there 🤗#photography#blackandwhite#exhibition#myart#newyorkcity#nyc#nycphotographer#art#creative#les#usa#ny (at New York, New York)

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: The Psychedelic Pollution Floating in the Gowanus Canal

“Chronos” (2014), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

For his Gowanus Waters photographs, published last year in a monograph by Powerhouse Books, New Yorker Steven Hirsch brings his lens so close to the toxic surface of the heavily polluted Brooklyn waterway, you may worry about his health. Yet the results are strangely mesmerizing, transforming the burbling brew from more than 150 years of industrial runoff and dumping into psychedelic abstractions. Streaks of purple mingle with neon greens and blues, while rainbows wisps swirl amid a murky darkness, like galaxies floating in space.

Cover of Gowanus Waters (courtesy Powerhouse Books)

The Gowanus Waters book follows a 2014 exhibition of the pictures at Lilac Gallery. Like Miska Draskoczy’s recently published photographs of the wildlife and nature of the Gowanus Canal, Hirsch’s vibrant images encourage a new perspective on the 1.8-mile waterway. And while they’re not necessarily a form of environmental advocacy, it’s hard to separate them from the site’s polluted past. The Gowanus neighborhood continues to be gentrified and developed (the gleaming Whole Foods got a $12.9 million tax credit for its cleanup of contaminated land) even as the adjacent waters remain poisonous. In a 2013 article for Popular Science, Dan Nosowitz asked, “What would happen if you drank water from the Gowanus Canal?” The answer was complex due to the sheer number and variety of pollutants — in one of the stagnant micro-zones, you might be guzzling raw sewage or E. coli, while another would be rich in radioactive material or arsenic. No matter what, you’d probably get dysentery.

The Gowanus Canal is now an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund Site, although it’s possible the cleanup plan could be delayed under the Trump administration, with longtime EPA opponent Scott Pruitt leading the agency. Some of its “black mayonnaise,” a grotesque mix of coal tar, heavy metals, and PCBs lining the canal’s bottom, along with old boats, tires, ragged metal, and even boulders, was dredged late last year. Will Hirsch’s photographs eventually be a time capsule of industrial folly?

“One spring day, we visited the canal and Hirsch saw, for the first time, the water teeming with tiny fish, but caught virtually none of the slime he’d been hoping to discover to make new photographs,” journalist Jordan G. Teicher writes in an introduction to Gowanus Waters. “Indeed, thanks to its Superfund status, the canal — long referred to by locals as ‘Lavender Lake’ for its distinctive, unnatural hues — is slowly on the mend. Soon enough, Hirsch’s polluted palette will be a memory, much like the industrial heyday of the borough’s interior.”

“Theros” (2015), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

“Theia” (2014), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

“Symplegades” ( 2014), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

“Styx” (2015), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

“Hephaestus” (2014), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

“Ceto” (2014), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

“Psamathe” (2014), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

“Asteria” (2014), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

“Mania” (2015), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

“Aphrodite” (2014), from Gowanus Waters by Steven Hirsch (courtesy the artist and Powerhouse Books)

Steven Hirsch’s Gowanus Waters is published by Powerhouse Books and available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

The post The Psychedelic Pollution Floating in the Gowanus Canal appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[davidsimonton]

Egret, from Gowanus Wild, Photo by Miska Draskoczy

[gowanusnightheron]

Photographer Miska Draskoczy (@miskamagic​) is in the midst of his Gowanus Night Heron Instagram takeover. Check out his work here: https://instagram.com/gowanusnightheron/

[fishstickmonkey]

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild

(via Hyperallergic)

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: The Improbable Nature of the Gowanus Canal, Photographed at Night

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood is a rapidly gentrifying Superfund site, where the ecological disruption of over 150 years of industry endures alongside new condos and commercial spaces. Yet animals and plants, both natural and invasive, live amid the decay and revitalization. Beginning in 2012, local photographer Miska Draskoczy explored Gowanus’s streets and toxic canal by night, capturing the “wilderness” of this urban environment.

Cover of Gowanus Wild (courtesy Unnatural Kingdom)

“My working definition was any element of organic material or weather phenomenon that interacted with the built landscape, whether it’s a plant hanging on a cinderblock wall, footprints in ice, or more traditional forms, like the canal as a body of water or shots of wildlife,” Draskoczy told Hyperallergic. “I thought less about the series being strictly documentarian and more as a metaphoric longing for the wild. Like how even a small bit of overgrown weeds or a patch of crumbling masonry is still an expression of wild forces unchecked by human control, and can provide an avenue for us to experience that connection to wilderness.”

Over 50 of Draskoczy’s photographs are featured in Gowanus Wild, recently released by Unnatural Kingdom in conjunction with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy. The monograph follows a 2014 exhibition of the images at Ground Floor Gallery and a 2015 installation at the Brooklyn Public Library. In these recent years, the EPA began a cleanup of the canal (that reportedly can’t be halted by the Trump administration), while artists have faced eviction from longtime studios. The residential and commercial stories of the Gowanus continue to overlap with its distant past as a pre-colonial salty marsh on the edge of the harbor.

Pages from Gowanus Wild (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Pages from Gowanus Wild (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

“These photographs capture a distinct moment in the evolution of the Gowanus watershed, one that is dramatically different from how it was one hundred years ago, even more different from four hundred years ago, and I expect quite different from what we will see in another fifty years,” writes Andrea Parker, executive director of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, in a book essay.

In one image, a snowy egret perches by the quiet canal, while a sunflower blooms above strewn coffee cups and a discarded plastic barrier. Branches of a tree crawl through a chain-link fence, and, in another shot, red vines creep over graffiti on a white wall. Some of these saturated scenes are accompanied by Draskoczy’s poems, with the first setting the tone: “Night sets and the green canal smooths out / a soft promise in umber tones and emerald glass. / The city holds its breath, the tides of commerce recede.” The streets in the photographs are deserted, and sometimes an eerie mist hovers over the waterway, which is polluted with overflow sewage and chemicals from 19th- and early 20th-century gas plants and tanneries.

“It’s taken on an almost mythic quality,” Draskoczy said. “I wanted to touch on that sense of adventure, of exploring places you’re supposed to avoid, while also illustrating the paradox of Gowanus still remaining very much alive in spite of all the environmental destruction.”

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild (courtesy the artist)

Miska Draskoczy’s Gowanus Wild is published by Unnatural Kingdom and available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

The post The Improbable Nature of the Gowanus Canal, Photographed at Night appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[artnet]

Jolie Laide

Jolie Laide ("Pretty, Ugly") is a contradictory French term composed of precise opposites, albeit subjective ones, somewhat like the French phrase 'un je ne said quoi'. It is commonly used to refer to someone (or something) which may at first seem rather "ugly" as opposed to appealing in a conventional way. However, Jolie Laide often turns out to be charming, seductive intriguing and even alluring.

With this contradictory theme in mind, Tepper Takayama Fine Arts selected the photographs of Renan Cepeda, Miska Draskoczy and Cassio Vasconellos, for a joint exhibition of desolate, abandoned, wasted or simply plain urban and rural landscapes and constructions. At first glance all these sites are devoid of traditional aesthetic grace but metamorphose in the hands of these artists into works of art that exemplify the meaning of "jolies laides.”

Discover the exhibition Jolie Laide. 

[pilatesembodiedx]

a full moon, river lapsing/black beneath bland mirror-sheen

[gowanusnightheron]

Event flyers arrived yesterday! A huge thank you to Miska Draskoczy for the beautiful event identity and collateral. To RSVP to the Nov. 14, 2020, pop-up exhibition, go here: https://www.facebook.com/events/344564030163702

[fishstickmonkey]

Miska Draskoczy, photograph from Gowanus Wild

(via Hyperallergic)

[ifiwereahoarder]

People, their Things, their Stories

Here's the Thing is a new weekly Web TV biography series.  Each roughly four-minute episode consists of a voice-over narration by the subject as he or she looks at objects captured in twenty-five photographs taken at his or her home. 

The series is remarkable (and relevant to this blog) in part because it vividly demonstrates the various ways in which people understand themselves in relation to the things that surround them. Each episode captures the movement of the subject from the generic identity announced in superimposed text at the beginning: "Madra Furman, student," or "Carlos Zapata, office manager," to the more complex appellation that emerges from the narration: "Madra Furman, student, avid reader, candy lover, journaler," or "Carlos Zapata, office manager, family man, mac daddy, daddy mac."  

In addition, like Martin Hampton's short film Possessed, the series presents a compelling play of stillness and movement, as the voice-over animates the sequence of photographic images.  

I particularly like Episode 3, which features cellist Dale Henderson, "musician, coin collector, nostalgist, gourmand," and--along with series director Miska Draskoczy--former classmate of mine at Concord Academy. 

The episodes are online at http://www.youtube.com/HeresTheThingTV

[gowanusnightheron]

What is the creative potential of an empty box? See how area artists answered this question in Case Study, the latest project from your friends at Gowanus Night Heron!

More than two dozen artists were invited to reimagine simple acrylic cases, and the results will be on view during Gowanus Open Studios, this Saturday, Oct. 16, 2021, and Sunday, Oct. 17, 2021, from noon to 6 p.m. both days. The Case Study locations are as follows:

Case Study: Social Structure Treasure Island 183 Lorraine St. / GOS map location 108

Case Study: Faith, Healing, Feeling Shapeshifter Lab 18 Whitwell Pl. / GOS map location 49

Case Study: Organica/Gowanus Makeville Studio 125 8th St. / GOS map location 89

Case Study: Light and Obscurity Arts Gowanus Offices 540 President St. / GOS map location 43

A portion of Case Study sales will go to Arts Gowanus and Gowanus Mutual Aid.

If you can't make it to all four locations, no worries! Unsold Case Studies works will be on view at the Gowanus Open Studios closing party, 6:30-9:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 17, at the Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse at 165 2nd St. Participating artists: Natale Adgnot, Johanna Aenderl, Nora Evita Aresti, Tania L. Balan-Gaubert, Lauren Bierly, Emily Chiavelli, Jessica Dalrymple, Yvena Despagne, Valeria Divinorum, Miska Draskoczy, Keith Duquette, Arielle Jennings, K Haskell, Karen Mainenti, Hermann Mejia, Stephanie Norberg, Avani Patel,  Anne-Sophie H. Plume, Sean Qualls, Bonnie Ralston, John Richey, Rick Secen, Andrew Smenos, Sonjie Feliciano Solomon, Tamara Staples, Johnny Thornton, Marlene Weisman, and Kasia Zurek-Doule About: Gowanus Night Heron is an artist-run event collective committed to celebrating the community and creative spirit of Gowanus. Gowanus Night Heron was founded by artists Bonnie Ralston, Miska Draskoczy, and Kasia Zurek-Doule and held its inaugural event, a pop-up show on the banks of the canal, in early June.