Abby Goldstein

Reimagining Brooklyn, 2017, by Abby Goldstein

Reimagining  Brooklyn is a series of  improvisations. I work in response to what I hear, see, feel, as well as to my physical surroundings. Often my work begins with a prompt. In the Reimagining Brooklyn series, it is my distress about the building boom that is overshadowing the Brooklyn neighborhood where I live. As a salve I researched and printed historic maps of Brooklyn onto archival paper to use as my base. This is what Brooklyn looked like 100 plus years ago. I find solace in using these historic maps to set up parameters. These visual confines permit me to improvise, disrupt, and devise new topologies; I break boundaries, redistribute neighborhoods, eliminate, redraw, and reinterpret. Through this process I take ownership of the remapping of my landscape.

It is the perception of losing my sense of direction while traversing familiar and unfamiliar places; coupled with my background in graphic design, typography, and dance; that has cultivated in me a need to make order, make connections, find pathways, visualize systems, and burrow in to the minute details that make up the whole. Swathes of color and biomorphic shapes interwoven with meandering lines juxtapose the built and natural environments. Each mark informs the next in an introspective dialogue that maps my mental and physical reactions to my personal condition and to the world’s social, climatic, and political upheavals.

Abby’s website: http://abbygoldstein.com/works-on-paper-reimagining-brooklyn

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