** Please join us this Saturday, June 21st from 11:00am - 1:00pm for a brunch in celebration of our current exhibitions, Amy Park: 1200' and Ruby Palmer in the Project Room.
Amy Park’s watercolor paintings utilize Modernist architecture as their point of departure. Grids are laboriously constructed through repetitive pencil marks and precise watercolor strokes, creating enormous, optically charged fields that mirror the order, layering, scale, and density of information present in the urban experience. Building on her previous work in which Park honed in on architectural detail and its rhythmic patterns and relationships, Park has now moved up and out from her street-level perspective to take on New York City as a whole.
Park’s densely packed and visually collaged cityscapes were inspired by a flight down the Hudson River just parallel to the island of Manhattan in her family’s 40-year-old single-engine Grumman. The altitude of flight (and the show’s namesake), 1,200 feet, allowed Park to take in the city from its vertical center, capturing the flight’s unique speed and elevation in hundreds of photos that would later collage into the inspiration for her watercolors. These panels herald the flight’s rapidly shifting perspective, with the shown slices of skyline not literally contiguous yet visually coherent. Cities themselves are vast physical collages in a constant state of flux: morphing with shifts in legislation, as architects reimagine and redesign them, and as their inhabitants move through the streets. Park’s watercolors layer, collage, and document this information of change, formally manifesting New York City’s relentless transformation.
