Have you stopped by the one well on Greenpoint Ave, yet? It’s an amazingly curated shopping experience. Kerry, the owner, has an great eye not only for picking out unique vintage finds and the wares of local makers, but she also puts on great art exhibitions.
Tonight, Friday June 8th, is the Opening Reception for Where They Swam/Other Relics, a photographic exhibition by Gina Pollack that documents the pre-construction of the soon to be re-opened McCarren Park Pool in 2009.
Would you believe a bag is what brought Kerry & Gina together? Gina loved a bag in the one well, which she found on a KRRB, an online flea market for locals. (Think Craigslist has a baby with Pinterest.) “On a whim,” Gina sent Kerry her website, and now Gina is for the first time is having “my own show, my own work.”
Like all multitasking creative Greenpointers, Gina has a pretty cool day job, designing a book for street artist JRs, Inside Out Project, who is known for his outstanding gigantic portraits on the landscapes of flavellas in Brazil and the South Bronx.
For Where They Swam, Gina operated like a street artist in order to get shots inside the pool by climbing over construction zone barricades.
Gina is inspired by what she calls “spaces in flux.” At the McCarren Park pool she described what she found: “Debris. Everything was decomposing. Weeds were growing in between the cement. Bricks missing. Lots of leaves.” She even found old baskets that swimmers put their clothes in, which will be laminated on the walls as sculpture in the newly renovated complex.
Since her photo sessions, Gina has witnessed the pool go through a “complete transformation.” She said it’s, “haunting to think about how much the neighborhood has changed around the structure. Now you see all the luxury condos around it and before it was an immigrant neighborhood.”
She thinks it might be interesting to follow-up this project with photographs of swimmers in the new pool and compare them to historical photos she has seen from the thirties.
Where They Swam / Other Relics
Photography by Gina Pollack
Opening Reception Friday June 8, 2012, 7-10pm
the one well
165 Greenpoint Ave