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 analogue 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. Change is a persistent companion to lumen prints; they cannot be fixed without altering their hue, value and contrast. Left unfixed, these images fade and change with exposure to light, they hover perceptibly between existence and disappearance, echoing the predicament of development that transforms neighborhoods while displacing their people.
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