Mespat, 2001
Video (19:24 minutes)
Turkey feathers, monofilament, steel
Original sound track by Michael J. Schumacher
132 × 168 × 12 inches
Based on a popular, pre-cinematic entertainment—painted moving panoramas—this video installation pans continuously along the 3.5-mile shoreline of urban Newtown Creek, the estuary dividing Brooklyn and Queens. It revisits an area known as “Mespat” (“bad water place”) to the native Lenape, who were displaced from there by European colonists in 1642. Polluted by raw sewage and industry from the mid-19th century, the creek was also the site of a 17 million-gallon oil spill in the 1950’s and was designated a Superfund site in 2010.