Walter Benjamin, in The Arcades Project, describes the difference between “Trace” and “Aura”. Benjamin says that Trace is “…the appearance of nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.” (-Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, transl. by Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 447)

My recent works feature the landscapes of both the Brooklyn waterfront and Provincetown and Truro, MA. In each instance, and in spite of the obvious polarity between industry and pristine ocean-front, Absence is my muse.

Benjamin asks us to consider what remains figuratively and literally, psychically and physically when some thing which was, ceases to be? Red Hook, Brooklyn, a former longshoring and industrial waterfront neighborhood, is changing (largely due to the booming real estate market in New York City); its transformation made visibly manifest through the abandonment and/or the re-development of industrial architecture. The dunes and shacks of the Outer Cape are too in a state of perpetual transformation: the wind and the elements shifting the sand dunes subtly. The architecture is eventually swallowed up, consumed, by Nature’s elements. Yet Benjamin suggests that there is something constant and perpetual that may be left behind as witness – as “aura”. Difficult to define, ineluctable, illusive, yet omni-present, the remains of architecture – whether industrial and rendered obsolete by the real estate developer’s quest or vernacular shacks made from driftwood and detritus subsumed by the wind carried sands, are for me, haunting and compelling.

In both cases, I hope that the audience responds to what I respond to: a kind of unruly beauty which presents itself to us in surprising ways – in Red Hook it is rusting steal, windows and buildings off square, torn fences within a landscape that is just at sea level. On the dunes, the shacks tilt, the sand creeps up their structures like snow drifts, the relentless wind driving the sand into their windows, pocking their facades, so that eventually they are reclaimed by the land. Exposed and vulnerable to either the wrecking ball or to Nature’s elements, both the “Trace” and “Aura” remain constant reminders of what is and what once was, documenting, hopefully, that point in-between.

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