- Manal Abu-Shaheen
- Vahap Avşar
- Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco
- Brian Caverly
- Kerry Downey
- Magali Duzant
- Golnaz Esmaili
- Mohammed Fayaz
- Kate Gilmore
- Jonah Groeneboer
- Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen
- Dave Hardy
- Sylvia Hardy
- Shadi Harouni
- Janks Archive
- Robin Kang
- Kristin Lucas
- Carl Marin
- Eileen Maxson
- Melanie McLain
- Shane Mecklenburger
- Lawrence Mesich
- Freya Powell
- Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
- Alan Ruiz
- Samita Sinha and Brian Chase
- Barb Smith
- Monika Sziladi
- Alina Tenser
- Trans-Pecos with 8 Ball Community, E.S.P. TV, and Chillin Island
- Mark Tribe
- Sam Vernon
- Max Warsh
- Jennifer Williams
- An Itinerary with Notes
- Exhibition Views
- Hidden
- Watershed
- A Distant Memory Being Recalled (Queens Teens Respond)
- Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela
- Sweat, Leaks, Holes: Crossing the Threshold
- PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding
- Interview: Melanie McLain and Alina Tenser
- Personal Space
- Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network
- Responses from Mechanical Turk
- MAPS, DNA, AND SPAM
- Queens Internacional 2016
- Uneven Development: On Beirut and Plein Air
- A Crisis of Context
- Return to Sender
- Interview: Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- Mining Through History: The Contemporary Practices of Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- A Conversation with Shadi Harouni's The Lightest of Stones
- Directions to a Gravel Quarry
- Walk This Way
- Interview: Brian Caverly and Barb Smith
- "I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."
- BEAT IT! (Queens Teens respond)
- Moments
- Lawn Furniture
- In Between Difference, Repetition, and Original Use
- Interview: Dave Hardy and Max Warsh
- Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz
- City of Tomorrow
- Noticing This Space
- NO PLACE FOR A MAP
- The History of the World Was with Me That Night
- What You Don't See (Queens Teens Respond)
- Interview: Allison Davis and Sam Vernon
- When You’re Smiling…The Many Faces Behind the Mask
- Interview: Jesus Benavente and Carl Marin
- The Eternal Insult
- Janking Off
- Queens Theatricality
“A watershed is an area of land that ‘sheds’ rain and melted snow into a larger body of water, such as a lake, wetland, reservoir, or ocean.” – from explanatory text of watershed relief map at Queens Museum
The slippery surface of a transparent sheet of plastic doesn’t absorb what it touches. Light passes through it. Liquid slides over it. Kerry Downey plays with the slippage of shadow and substance in A Third Space (2014-16), an animation made on the flatbed surface of an overhead projector. Shapes appear as a viscous liquid tries to acquire form, its attempts thwarted by the slickness and flatness of the surface and the sharp cuts of Downey’s jumpy edits. Shadows of the artist’s hands lay over the blobs, merging with them in the projector’s bright blankness. The transparency sheet is all scratched up by use, by wear, perhaps by the artist’s own markings. Like the plastic, these shallow grooves in it don’t capture shadows or substances but passively receive their forms and formlessness.
Downey speaks on their animation’s soundtrack. The voice is inexpressive, nonchalant, and low. When I put the headphones on, I hear a list of years, and an event for each one. The selection seems arbitrary. Some of the events sound fake. A chronicle collects facts before they’ve merged in history, listing events without the mutual contamination of cause-and-effect relationships, without the absorbency of narrative. The dry list sounds like an observation of surroundings in the present before they’ve dripped into the past. The succession of facts is more like the cuts of the video or the scratches in the plastic than the formation and deformation of the shapes and blobs that darken the projector’s light.
Queens International 2016 fills a narrow suite of galleries. Downey’s video plays near one of the openings where the show flows into the Museum’s lobby, and at the opposite end there’s an installation by Golnaz Esmaili. A video tracks her meandering movement in a field of dirt, littered with garbage and new plant life. The footage is stilted—stills played in rapid succession. Around the edge of the digital projection there are outlines of pink, green, and blue, the edges of squares of color that faintly filter the footage. They’re cast by an analog projector that marks time with its old clicks. Along the wall, below the two projector beams that share a destination on the wall, lie three prints in resin. They’re made from photograms of the plants that Esmaili found amid the rubbish and the dirt and laid on paper that darkened around their opacity. The resin is thickly gelatinous. The ridges of its slightly uneven edges preserve its former viscosity.
Downey’s and Esmaili’s work, like that of several other artists in Queens International 2016, touch on themes of forgetting and recovering, of memory bleeding into the present and withdrawing from it. I’m listening to Downey’s voice through headphones that can’t mute the music coming from the Museum’s big central gallery. It used to be an ice rink and its recessed floor recalls that origin but now it’s more like an agora, a public gathering space simulated indoors. It’s an unseasonably warm spring day and mariachi bands are performing for a small and happy audience. Their music fills the whole Museum. It’s louder in my ears than Downey’s soft insistent voice. It’s a reminder of the Museum’s double-sided role in the communities it serves, affirming familiar cultures and introducing new ones. At an end of the Museum, around the corner from Esmaili’s installation, there’s a relief map of the New York City watershed, which shows how water passes through the surface of the Earth and comes back up to it—how water gets from sky to spigot. It maps the contact of two entities, one diffusely fluid and the other more solid and particular—like a culture and a museum, like International and Queens.
Brian Droitcour is an associate editor at Art in America. His writing has appeared in Parkett, Spike, DIS magazine, Rhizome, Artforum, and other publications. He edited The Animated Reader: Poetry of Surround Audience, an anthology published by the New Museum in conjunction with its 2015 Triennial.