Gilgo Beach: A Physical Absence

Over the past fifteen years the “Ocean Parkway Killer” has targeted sex workers along this stretch of roadway, ultimately putting his victims to rest at Gilgo Beach. It is this series of events that Nick Kline examines in his exhibit at Open Source Gallery, Gilgo Beach. In a sterilized, clinical gallery space, in which the track lighting of a traditional gallery has been replaced with fluorescents and the conventionally clean white floor is covered in stains, Kline’s detailed large-scale photographs create the air of a crime scene laboratory.

These photographs follow the trail along the Ocean Parkway to Gilgo Beach, where Kline took castings of the grass and landscape in rubber silicone. The distance along the macabre route that he followed would later become the title for the photograph of each casting, every image defined by the point at which it fell in the killer’s trajectory.

Most of the photographs are black and white, the contrast creating dark voids where the casted object once was, with the exception of one photograph which uses a muted, neutral palette. This single, color, photograph draws attention to the black and white of the rest of the exhibit and emphasizes the loss of color in the other works. Two of his monumental photographs are especially effective, overwhelming the viewer with the texture of the grass imprinted in the silicone molding. The vast size and limited palette of the photographs with the cold environment of the gallery creates an image of the landscape in the viewer’s mind – an expansive, barren beach where the women were buried. The knowledge of the now lost subject imbues these beautiful and otherwise neutral photographs with a sense of trauma.

In a small recess in the back of the gallery, two more photographs are displayed, forcing the viewer to enter the small, somewhat hidden space in order to view them. The isolation of this small space, as well as the participatory, investigative aspect involved in leaving the larger gallery space to enter the small annex, furthers the sense of a forensic analysis. This smaller room is cold, white, and detached, but simultaneously intimate, and the experience here becomes immensely personal.

The effect of the forensic laboratory space extends to the newspapers that his photographs have been reprinted on. These contain no information about the exhibit or the photographs themselves, emphasizing the absence of the subject and leaving the viewer to simply deal with an object. Kline states that his work examines psychological trauma and its “unseen impact on survivors” in the absence of the subject, sex workers, a group whose lives are invisible to much of society. After reading the information about the subject, the viewer is left to make connections using objects in the same way that the forensics would in the absence of these women.

Gilgo Beach creates the feeling of absence by using photographs that are expressly tangible to emphasize the physical space around that which is gone, making its loss more apparent.

Nick Kline: Gilgo Beach will run at Open Source Gallery, in Brooklyn, NY, through October 4^th 2012.