GOODNEWS, Brooklyn
May 3rd from 8-11pm and May 4th from 1-5pm, 2019.
This solo exhibition documents and complicates Amazon's development of, and subsequent withdrawal from, a planned new headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, New York. I showed nine readymade sculptures made out of Amazon shipping materials found in and on the borders of Queens and fifteen photographs printed on transparencies of the roughly 4 blocks the headquarters planned to replace. The waterfront location and its immediate neighbors included: an NYC Department of Education building; a community flea market; the NYC Department of Emergency Blood Transfusion overstock warehouse; a gentleman’s club; an NYC Department of Transportation road salt overstock; a luxury apartment skyscraper; a cafe named Small Kitchen; a packaging and shipping business; and car repair shops.
Work was made during the three-month period of Amazon announcing the intended headquarters then withdrawing after successful anti-gentrification protests (November 13, 2018-February 14, 2019). Visitors could swap and rearrange the hanging photographs on two overhead projectors, and many of the nine readymades replaced traditional living room furniture in the home gallery, including doormats, throw pillows, and ice cube trays. I aimed to visualize the three months of community debate, stress, and confusion without re-victimizing those potentially displaced by the plan. My goal was to place the viewer as archivist, judge, and student of this “successful” case study that stopped a potentially gentrifying corporation. Who “won” here? What went “right?” Will another mega corporation come back in a few years?
$700 of sales at the exhibition were donated to Urban Upbound, a nonprofit that provides tools and resources for residents of NYC public housing to achieve economic mobility and self-sufficiency. They particularly focus on the Queensbridge Houses, which would have been three blocks from the Amazon Headquarters. Two months after the exhibition, Urban Upbound then raised an undisclosed amount as a participating nonprofit of Amazon Prime Day, which additionally complicates the position of Amazon, the nonprofit, and the artist in a traditional anti-gentrification narrative.
Daniel Sharp, Universal Support System (cardboard, tape, four metal bars), 2019.