Nostalgia

An exhibition of drawings and paintings about Coney Island, 2009

Installation of paintings and drawings, 2009

These pieces are carefully executed renderings: like medical illustrations of the exposed corpse of a half-remembered playground.

Creating the aesthetic of a lost or fading memory is a challenge that has always eluded me. Finding a way to invoke, diagrammatically, the experience of a fleeting moment, half-remembered or long-past, is a project that begs to be finished, but is only possible in short bursts of passing energy.  When seeking a method for conveying that feeling,  few places offer a more refined object of study than Coney Island.  The epitome of urban decay and a physical embodiment of loss, it contains the last hulking remnants of someone’s memory of innocence past: sitting on the shore, waiting to be copied.

Now, as if doubling the sadness, Coney Island’s sense of loss is gradually fading as well.  Even nostalgia disappears eventually.

Click here for images of this installation.