Streetshadows

One Stop Beer Shop · Friday, May 11, 2012 from 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM

Posted 1 year ago
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Streetshadows Banners
Opening Friday May 11th, 7-10pm
One-stop Beer Shop
134 Kingsland ave, Brooklyn 11222
(718) 599-0128
1-sbs.com

I'm making up a new batch of my Streetshadows banners. I've been taking photos of the shadows cast by street signs and wrought iron fences in Greenpoint for a number of years. I then print the shots on large sheets of vellum, a material normally used for architectural drawings. I'll also be showing some of my smaller Streetshadows pieces, where I paint the shapes of the shadows on found objects.

One-Stop Beer Shop is a new place that offers great beer available to go or to stay in. They also have an innovative food menu and some interesting beer cocktails.
There will be a 2-for-1 Beer special during the opening!
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Chris Smith aka ‘subtexture’ is bringing the light and shadows of his Greenpoint neighborhood onto the walls of the One-stop Beer shop.

Like many longtime residents of Brooklyn, Chris Smith has witnessed neighborhood change over the years. In a somewhat common residential phenomenon, change slowly crept in without much notice. Then, seemingly as sudden as lamp posts flickering on in the evening, change was all around. It’s not uncommon for Brooklyn residents to feel as though they live in an uneasy present tinged by air of nostalgia and tainted with doubts for the future.

His work is an appreciation of a Greenpoint, the photos capture snippets of light that illuminate a neighborhood in transition – vinyl siding, wrought iron railings, chain link fences, peeling paint. Details that, for better or for worse will disappear as high rises apartment buildings replace the 3 story row houses and low slung industrial buildings.

The neighborhood is explored at golden hour, that time of day when the sun is low, the
shadows are long and the light is transitory and fleeting. Finding the abstract in everyday life, he captures the graphic shapes cast by street signs, traffic lights, and street lights. He then manipulates his photos, creating high contrast deeply textured images and paints the shapes on found objects such as old signs, rusted bits of metal and other broken down bits of a fading neighborhood. Shadows are first photographed, then digitally manipulated to further increase the sense of contrast and isolation from the background. The resulting graphic images are then scaled up or down and reinterpreted using different media depending on their destination in his series.

Through a shadow motif, he explores the transitory nature of man in his environment. More specifically, his own experience in Brooklyn. In his work, street signs and traffic signals stand in as both a functional source of direction and due to the fleeting nature of shadows, metaphorical signs of change.

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