| What we experience in the moment is ultimately possessed by superior tides of an invisible captor. The present is repeatedly handed over to the past, as a fossil of memory, and traded for a future of intangible predictions and expectations. The moment, now, is an opaque curtain that conceals the appearance of history. Behind its crust are layers as thick as the innumerable blinks of time itself. Between layers 2003 and 2006, Chris Soria has explored the once-mighty American Manufacturing Company, located at the East River waterfront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. |
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Chris Soria
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What we experience in the moment is ultimately possessed by superior tides of an invisible captor. The present is repeatedly handed over to the past, as a fossil of memory, and traded for a future of intangible predictions and expectations. The moment, now, is an opaque curtain that conceals the appearance of history. Behind its crust are layers as thick as the innumerable blinks of time itself.
Between layers 2003 and 2006, Chris Soria has explored the once-mighty American Manufacturing Company, located at the East River waterfront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Equipped with a Canon FTb and telephoto lens, Chris maps out the abandoned complex, which, during the first half of the 20th century, was the world’s leading maker of rope and the second-largest employer in Brooklyn.
Within the triple barbed wire fence with signs that read "24 hour video surveillance" and "attack dogs," Chris meanders along the riverfront into an obscure doorway in one of the building’s nooks, and three stories up a precarious staircase leading to a narrow brick bridge no wider than a sneaker. This is where he shoots Learning To Fly, a piece he’ll later montage from the hundreds of pictures he takes throughout the year. Shimmying across pipes, over collapsed floors, up broken ladders and beyond sealed passages, Chris is able to photograph the warehouse from perspectives few have had the privilege to witness in decades. In fact, no one will ever again be able to explore this industrial labyrinth since its demise in the suspicious ten-alarm fire of May 2, 2006.
In terms of process, Chris works in two stages: photographing and montaging. He does, however, go back and forth between these two stages numerous times throughout the evolution of a piece. He shoots a few hundred pictures, assembles them, returns a month later to shoot a few hundred more, and so on. Most of the pictures in his montages can’t even be seen. They’re underneath layers and layers of overlapping montages.
The factory and its machinery, archaic and neglected for decades, are a photographic Petri dish of mould and rust. Chris juxtaposes the spring leaves of a tree, growing from a pile of gears, with the snow-covered branches of the same tree. He makes montages of different building sections and combines them to create new buildings. Eventually, where and when pluralize. Time separates. Space is replaced. And everything becomes an imitation of what is lost.
