ROCKAWAY

Grand Central Madison, New York, NY

January 2024 - June 2024

Proposal: I want to put the Rockaway ocean in Grand Central Madison.

My grandmother grew up on B 126th St. in Far Rockaway, on the block where the boardwalk ends. The house has stayed in the family for over a century. It’s where my mother learned to ride a bike. It’s where my youngest son learned to ride his two-wheeler this summer. The sand is a few steps away. I am old enough now to see this place in fractal rhythms: small time - waves break; medium time - tides slide out; epochal time - generations come and go. For me, this project is personal, a visual reminder of how my family keeps clock.

The MTA Arts & Design video installation in Grand Central Madison is just plain huge. Each of the five screen is 17 feet wide and 7.5 feet tall. That makes the entire project 93 feet long (including the 2 foot gaps between the screens, if my math is correct). Whoa this is big! When I first understood the scope of the project, I immediately thought of Rockaway. There just aren’t that many places that are so boundless, especially in the city. I love the way that the scale of the video screens will capture a bit of the magnificent breadth of the ocean. I love the paradox of placing this panorama, at this size, in an underground transit station. It makes the unexpected presence of the ocean, rearing up once per hour, such a surprise.

To construct the animation, I will paint 24 small oil paintings of the surf. After photographing each image in high resolution, I will digitally delete the negative space. Using keyframes in Adobe Premiere, I will layer the images of the waves in a cadence of rising and falling so that the ocean feels like it is moving inextricably towards the viewer. When I have established a (seemingly) continuous rhythm, I will nest the entire animation. Then I will start to layer the nested sequences while reducing the vertical dimension so that the waves appear to recede back in space. I will complement this pictorial depth with gradations in value (high contrast to low contrast), hue (warm to cool), and saturation (high key to neutral). This technical approach will allow me to take on a project of this magnitude, five screens, five painted oceans sweeping forward.

I hope that the people walking through Grand Central Station will find my installation, tentatively titled B 126th St., mesmerizing. In the rumble/squeak of the subway, it is sometimes a challenge to preserve an unencumbered headspace. I imagine a rider hustling past the advertisements and public service announcements, when the screens turn over to the MTA Arts & Design logo. Then here comes a silent, roiling ocean pouring out of the wall. I hope that my installation will provide them with a psychological transportation, a moment of awe and grace. When I am in Rockaway, between the chaos of children (I have 3 boys) and my own mind clutter, I find peace in those waves. I hope to bring that same hypnotic ataraxia to this project.