Lovely and talented Purchase alum Regina Spektor performing her new song ‘Don’t Leave Me’ on Good Morning America yesterday, May 29.
Probably most stirring is the subtext. Something provocative, even alarming, is felt in the literal dangers that lurk beneath depictions of sites that appear mundane, creepy, or even attractive in a prosaic landscape Americana sort of way.
The current photography exhibit at The Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery is aptly titled: “Sites Unseen: Mapping Toxic Legacy & Tracking Superfund.” It consists of a series of images of American locales, on display for the students and the public, that beautifully capture some typically ugly aspects of the national landscape.
There are “sites unseen” in a trailer park in Florida, in a part of the Hudson River, on an island in the San Francisco Bay, and in a canal running through industrial Brooklyn. These places are just a few of the approximately 1,300 federal Superfund sites, areas of land designated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as contaminated by hazardous waste and in need of cleanup.
Brooke Singer, the photographer and a professor of new media at SUNY Purchase in suburban New York City, was inspired to create this project after a 2006 meet with Robert Martin, the former national ombudsman for the EPA. She felt a need to start a dialogue about these precarious regions, especially after Mr. Martin explained to her that the country’s most substantial area of toxicity never made the government agency’s National Priorities List.
“I had a meeting with [Mr. Martin]. He told me all of Lower Manhattan qualified as a Superfund site post-Sept. 11,” said Ms. Singer, who was perturbed by the news and the accompanying inaction. “And that triggered my interest.”
In the aftermath of that tragic event, the government again failed to protect the public. One of the top priorities was to get Wall Street back online, even though it had been blanketed with countless tons of hazardous substances. The American Thoracic Society last year issued a report that found a decline in lung function in a sampling of 327 non-smoking 9/11 rescue workers.
Prompted to investigate, Ms. Signer discovered the EPA’s visual information on these Superfund sites was lacking, or a bit dull. So she created Superfund365.org, a Web site that reveals a site every day for a year, beginning in September 2007.
That project served as something of a springboard to what has become the “Sites Unseen” exhibition. There are 13 of her photographs hanging in The Tremaine Gallery, and it is the first time she’s ever shown there. In fact, it is the first time this exhibit has been shown; she calls it a work in progress still.
But these photographs were taken with painstaking care—an abandoned building among a field of dead vegetation in the Connecticut town of Stratford appears particularly haunting, and the hazardous waste from the Raymark auto parts manufacturer reaches at least 16 feet under the ground. Contrast that with a scenic shot of the saltwater coast around the island of Viesques in Puerto Rico, a place that was once used and leased to other countries by the U.S. Navy as a military testing ground.
At face value, those two images appear to be worlds apart, but it is the “site unseen” contamination that weaves a thread through them. For Ms. Singer, the diversity of the Superfund landscapes was unanticipated.
“I wasn’t familiar at all. To me Superfund conjured up images of Love Canal, that history,” she shared, referring to the condemned neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y., now notorious for having been knowingly built on a toxic waste dump.
That fiasco occurred in the 1970s, and it struck her that a younger generation may not even be familiar with some of the more publicized accounts of gross negligence and human exposure to most vile of soils. But a Superfund site can still appear by a trailer park in the town of Clermont, Fla., even though Tower Chemical, a manufacturer of pesticides, polluted nearby Lake Apopka so drastically that its alligator population was reduced by 90 percent.
“It’s about sharing stories that are a natural confluence of individual history and environmentalism, health, all these things that came together at these sites,” said the artist. “There’s a full range to how they look.”
Greg Lock is the director of Photography and Related Media at The Hotchkiss School, and he’s also co-director of the Tremaine Gallery. He was once a colleague student of Ms. Singer’s at SUNY Purchase, and knowing her as an “activist/artist” he thought to reach out to her for an exhibition, as the private school in Salisbury is in the midst of numerous environmental initiatives.
When asked, he too spoke of how startling it was to see just how mundane many of these sites appear. One could walk past and never detect danger.
“I was struck by the normalcy, and the everydayness,” he said. “I’ve seen all these places. It’s fascinating how extreme [the contamination] is. It is hard to believe.”
His wife, Sarah Lock, arts administrator at Hotchkiss, finds the exhibition inspiring, artful and educational. She is drawn to the image of a naval shipyard in San Francisco; Hunters Point is an area of profound history, it is where the U.S.S. Indianapolis sailed from in 1945. That’s the vessel that carried atomic cargo.
The picture is perfect, showing the inside of a deactivated warehouse, with lots of steel beams and paneled windows and geometry mirrored perfectly on the wet cement underneath. To name another that is remarkably eye-catching, look at the image of an old gas station in Pittston, Penn.
The building is a bit rundown, the pumps are analog, and all it needs is a non-threatening guy in a greasy uniform to make it a Norman Rockwell painting. This exhibit is just that kind of Americana, but with a more ominous undertone.
As Ms. Singer said, “These places are quite extraordinary.”
“Sites Unseen” opened May 2 and continues through June 17. The gallery is open to the public free every day 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday. To learn more, see the Web sites at www.hotchkiss.org or www.bsing.net. n
The current photography exhibit at The Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery is aptly titled: “Sites Unseen: Mapping Toxic Legacy & Tracking Superfund.” It consists of a series of images of American locales, on display for the students and the public, that beautifully capture some typically ugly aspects of the national landscape.
There are “sites unseen” in a trailer park in Florida, in a part of the Hudson River, on an island in the San Francisco Bay, and in a canal running through industrial Brooklyn. These places are just a few of the approximately 1,300 federal Superfund sites, areas of land designated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as contaminated by hazardous waste and in need of cleanup.
Brooke Singer, the photographer and a professor of new media at SUNY Purchase in suburban New York City, was inspired to create this project after a 2006 meet with Robert Martin, the former national ombudsman for the EPA. She felt a need to start a dialogue about these precarious regions, especially after Mr. Martin explained to her that the country’s most substantial area of toxicity never made the government agency’s National Priorities List.
“I had a meeting with [Mr. Martin]. He told me all of Lower Manhattan qualified as a Superfund site post-Sept. 11,” said Ms. Singer, who was perturbed by the news and the accompanying inaction. “And that triggered my interest.”
In the aftermath of that tragic event, the government again failed to protect the public. One of the top priorities was to get Wall Street back online, even though it had been blanketed with countless tons of hazardous substances. The American Thoracic Society last year issued a report that found a decline in lung function in a sampling of 327 non-smoking 9/11 rescue workers.
Prompted to investigate, Ms. Signer discovered the EPA’s visual information on these Superfund sites was lacking, or a bit dull. So she created Superfund365.org, a Web site that reveals a site every day for a year, beginning in September 2007.
That project served as something of a springboard to what has become the “Sites Unseen” exhibition. There are 13 of her photographs hanging in The Tremaine Gallery, and it is the first time she’s ever shown there. In fact, it is the first time this exhibit has been shown; she calls it a work in progress still.
But these photographs were taken with painstaking care—an abandoned building among a field of dead vegetation in the Connecticut town of Stratford appears particularly haunting, and the hazardous waste from the Raymark auto parts manufacturer reaches at least 16 feet under the ground. Contrast that with a scenic shot of the saltwater coast around the island of Viesques in Puerto Rico, a place that was once used and leased to other countries by the U.S. Navy as a military testing ground.
At face value, those two images appear to be worlds apart, but it is the “site unseen” contamination that weaves a thread through them. For Ms. Singer, the diversity of the Superfund landscapes was unanticipated.
“I wasn’t familiar at all. To me Superfund conjured up images of Love Canal, that history,” she shared, referring to the condemned neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y., now notorious for having been knowingly built on a toxic waste dump.
That fiasco occurred in the 1970s, and it struck her that a younger generation may not even be familiar with some of the more publicized accounts of gross negligence and human exposure to most vile of soils. But a Superfund site can still appear by a trailer park in the town of Clermont, Fla., even though Tower Chemical, a manufacturer of pesticides, polluted nearby Lake Apopka so drastically that its alligator population was reduced by 90 percent.
“It’s about sharing stories that are a natural confluence of individual history and environmentalism, health, all these things that came together at these sites,” said the artist. “There’s a full range to how they look.”
Greg Lock is the director of Photography and Related Media at The Hotchkiss School, and he’s also co-director of the Tremaine Gallery. He was once a colleague student of Ms. Singer’s at SUNY Purchase, and knowing her as an “activist/artist” he thought to reach out to her for an exhibition, as the private school in Salisbury is in the midst of numerous environmental initiatives.
When asked, he too spoke of how startling it was to see just how mundane many of these sites appear. One could walk past and never detect danger.
“I was struck by the normalcy, and the everydayness,” he said. “I’ve seen all these places. It’s fascinating how extreme [the contamination] is. It is hard to believe.”
His wife, Sarah Lock, arts administrator at Hotchkiss, finds the exhibition inspiring, artful and educational. She is drawn to the image of a naval shipyard in San Francisco; Hunters Point is an area of profound history, it is where the U.S.S. Indianapolis sailed from in 1945. That’s the vessel that carried atomic cargo.
The picture is perfect, showing the inside of a deactivated warehouse, with lots of steel beams and paneled windows and geometry mirrored perfectly on the wet cement underneath. To name another that is remarkably eye-catching, look at the image of an old gas station in Pittston, Penn.
The building is a bit rundown, the pumps are analog, and all it needs is a non-threatening guy in a greasy uniform to make it a Norman Rockwell painting. This exhibit is just that kind of Americana, but with a more ominous undertone.
As Ms. Singer said, “These places are quite extraordinary.”
“Sites Unseen” opened May 2 and continues through June 17. The gallery is open to the public free every day 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday. To learn more, see the Web sites at www.hotchkiss.org or www.bsing.net. n
Three Design/Tech Alum Receive Tony Award Nods
When nominees for the 2012 Tony Awards were announced, Purchase had much to celebrate. Three of the four recognized in the category of Best Lighting Design of a Play graduated from the Theatre Design/Technology program.
Jeff Croiter ‘93 was nominated for his work in Peter and the Starcatcher, a play by author Rick Elice, that answers the century-old question: How did Peter Pan become The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up? Croiter has his own lighting design company located in New York City and has been the lighting designer for numerous Broadway and off-Broadway productions in recent years.
Brian MacDevitt ‘80 was nominated for his work in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the classic American story of Willy Loman, the 60-year old salesman struggling with family, work, and self esteem. MacDevitt, who honed his lighting skills for a decade off-Broadway and on, is now an associate professor at the University of Maryland. He has earned five Tony awards in recent years.
Kenneth Posner ‘87 was nominated for his lighting designs in Other Desert Cities, a play by Robin Baitz that probes the story of a once-promising novelist who announces to her family the imminent publication of a memoir dredging up a pivotal and tragic event in the family’s history. Posner has provided lighting design for productions both on and off-Broadway since graduating from Purchase College and received a Tony Award in 2007 for The Coast of Utopia.
Winners of the 66th annual Tony Awards will be announced live Sunday, June 10 on CBS.
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THE SPARTY CREW, SUNY Purchase. A group of friends that became a family in one semester at Purchase College but are now leaving each other due to graduation and returning home in other countries. Although we will not be together anymore We will have our memories and love for each other forever. Spout.
