Gongoozler: LIC
Fri, Jul 1, 2022, 6:30–8:30pm
Marco Barrera, Drawing a line backwards, 2022. Scan from publication.
As part of his new commission for In Practice: Literally means collapse, artist Marco Barrera exhibits an incomplete archive of water from different locations around New York City. Accompanying the archive, Barrera has created a publication that indexes the samples and presents his research on the oblique and obscured histories of the industrialization of New York City. The publication features an essay by Canal Street Research Association that traces the distribution of wealth in New York City through the infinite circulation of currency and plumbing.
“Gongoozler” is a British term for a person who is interested in and enjoys spectating activity that occurs on canals. Inspired by this past-time, Canal Street Research Association will lead a walking tour through Long Island City—meandering with diagonal stories of the neighborhood and its buried waters.
This program will meet outdoors in SculptureCenter’s Courtyard. No RSVP is required.
Gongoozler: LIC is held in conjunction with In Practice: Literally means collapse, on view at SculptureCenter through August 1, 2022.
Marco Barrera lives and works in New York. Barrera received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include Parapet Real Humans, St. Louis, and Jeffrey Stark, New York; and recent group exhibitions include Morán Morán, Los Angeles; Shanaynay, Paris; Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Rome; Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY; and Marlborough Chelsea, New York.
Canal Street Research Association is a fictional office founded in an empty storefront on Canal Street, New York City’s counterfeit epicenter, in fall 2020. Through research, re-staging, shadow economies, and vacancy, it delves into the cultural and material ecologies of Canal Street and its long history probing the limits of ownership and authorship. In September 2021, the office and its contents were moved into storage in a corner room on the second floor of MoMA PS1. From there, the routine movement of objects from this storage unit in Long Island City to ongoing research on Canal Street formed the basis of a series of associative meanders, surfacing flows of goods and ideas while tracing buried currents and currencies. Canal Street Research Association is currently in a loft on Canal Street, just west of the "goth McDonald’s”.
