Rustwater

Rustwater is a photographic project centered on New York’s contaminated waterways, specifically the Newtown Creek in Greenpoint and the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. These sites—long saturated with industrial runoff and chemical waste—are approached not merely as subjects but as agents of transformation. Working with medium-format film and digital images, I subject the prints to chemical processes: burning, acid corrosion, oxidation, and acrylic sedimentation. These interventions echo the environmental conditions of the sites themselves, rendering the image a reactive surface.

Rather than striving for representational clarity, Rustwater embraces decomposition, distortion, and decay as modes of truth-telling. The altered prints become chemical documents—part index, part wound—tracing not just the appearance of these landscapes but their damaged temporalities. Influenced by critical theory and spatial philosophy, the work considers how toxicity inscribes itself into matter and image, producing a residual memory that resists erasure.