In new exhibition, Elise Kirk’s photos imply that we all live in ‘New Town’
LAWRENCE — The bucolic, Midwestern locales of Elise Kirk’s photographs shown earlier this year at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art could hardly be further from the gritty heart of New York City, where Kirk made the series of photos being featured Nov. 19 through Dec. 12 at Washington University’s Weitman Gallery in St. Louis.
Kirk, who is associate professor in the University of Kansas Department of Visual Art, calls this body of work “New Town” because the images were made in and around Newtown Creek, the estuary that divides the New York boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn and flows into the East River. Its densely developed landscape is, in fact, an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund cleanup site.
That's hard to tell, though, from some of Kirk’s images, which focus tightly on colorful flora under a mist of white paint or hazy, disembodied, floating objects. Others are just as tightly focused on the soiled fingernails of a man scavenging copper wire or the hands of another harvesting a squash on a dead-end street. Other images take a broader view.
In an artist’s statement prepared for the exhibition, Kirk called the work a cross between “magical realism and ecological noir.”
“Though rooted in a particular location,” she wrote, “this place is not site-specific. ‘New Town’ is where we will all reside — an entangled cosmos where everything co-evolves, where permanent plastics swim with the fish, where humanity produces to consume and humans consume to live.”
Kirk has photographed the ever-changing postindustrial area for close to two decades, but said: “I started the 'New Town' work in earnest in 2021, when I was doing a residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, which is situated in my old neighborhood, by the creek.”
She has soaked more than one pair of tennis shoes, she said, hiking around the creek banks, because she was always focused on the work that resulted.
“I do want the images to be kind of confusing at first. Maybe there’s a first read and then something that rewards the long gaze, the long stare, which is more detail coming forth, or a shifting sense of scale, or a curious incongruity,” Kirk said.
The KU professor said she was excited that the Weitman is “a white-cube gallery that also extends into a kind of pin-up space outside the gallery, so I'm able to include a lot of my research that led to this project or that continues to evolve this project. ... I'm able to pin up a lot of archival work, a lot of found text. I'll be able to have that iterative, layered, cyclical time in the research ... and be in conversation with the work on the wall in the gallery.”