With whom would you weather the last storm?

One of my roommates, who already thinks I’m nuts (as I have recently taken to staging and filming elaborate rituals around the apartment), wanders down to the first floor one Monday evening. He gets half way down the staircase and looks out, but can’t see the floor. Instead, a canopy of colored fabric has risen to mid-stair level. A blanket sea spreads out beneath his feet and flows to the far corners of the finished basement. Swaying slowly in it’s own imagined currents. Shadows dart beneath the folds and fabric ripples on the surface. The underworld of the tent fort is occupied.

“Come on in!” We call. He wades in like a sport as we hoist up the remaining mast and string the last sheets to sail. The tent fort is finished when all of the collectively gathered sheets and blankets, chairs, poles, nets, hammocks, light fixtures, scarves, canvas swatches and tarps are connected to each other with some sort of pin or swath of duct tape.

There was no plan. The only blueprint I had for the evening was a well laid out veggie tray flanked by vodka tonics and friends who were game.

Once we had the structure in place, I took pictures of people in various poses for paintings – some staged and some candid. I’m making paintings with tents in them because they can suggest military outposts, refugee shelters, shantytowns, campgrounds, children’s forts, circus setups, post apocalyptic societies, native villages and romantic alcoves. What a medley! Sorting through all the associations and composing different combinations should keep me busy for a while.

When you look at a simple, low-tech shelter, you can read a lot about its maker and environment. Often its pieces are pulled from the immediate surroundings. Its production is transparent, as opposite to black box architecture and design (systems with fancy façades that render their complex, inner worlds unknowable) that dominate our infrastructure today.

Why go to all this trouble to stage elaborate life-sized references when the end product is a 2D image? (Did I mention drinks, friends and a good playlist?) The photographs that I took from the setup are very helpful to work from. But even more importantly, I find that once I’ve built something, I have a more comprehensive understanding of its form when I go to paint it. I’m able to turn it around in my head better, see it from all sides, so that I can play with and warp it instead of having to accept it as it comes in a still photo.

The other reason I gathered people to my basement was because my paintings are about young people gathering --- the patterns they make and how they group together. It made sense to set up a situation in which this stuff happens naturally. That way I could document the kinds of interactions that I’m interested in exploring “in the wild.” In the narratives that I paint (and write), the characters are often faced with extreme circumstances (environmental catastrophes, crumbling buildings, broken bodies). These were the people that gathered from nearby in Brooklyn when the stakes were low. But what if the waters really were rising and this was the group that got together to weather the storm? Would the structures that we built to stay afloat and the silhouettes of our huddled bodies look at all like this?

Thanks to the models! Check out the multi-talented bunch: Don (video art and mixed media), Siobhan (dance and dance writing), Marie (drawing and bookmaking), Felix (drawing and street art), Itzy (design and mixed media), Anton (journalism), George (film)