Drift

on view October 13 - November 18, 2017

Drift was artist Leonard Ursachi's temporary, site-specific installation in the Archway under the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, sponsored by DUMBO BID and NYC DOT, and exhibited in fall 2016 and winter 2017.

Over years, Ursachi had salvaged driftwood from the shore of the East River near his DUMBO studio. For Drift, he chose from his collection what was once a tree, eroded by water and time to its skeletal, elemental form.

He cast seven sculptures in concrete from that one piece of driftwood, and set them upside-down--or root-side up--on a platform made by casting planks from a disused East River pier. With Drift, as in his other art, Ursachi addresses lost and reclaimed history, memory, and the environment. 

The bridge, opened in 1909 to connect Manhattan to Brooklyn, was designed by an immigrant, Leon Moisseiff. According to Ursachi, “The Archway, beyond its structural purpose, is also a conduit, a gathering place, and an emblem of the city and its history. I wanted Drift to echo the poetry and drama of the East River, as people continue to flow over and around it.”

Don Burmeister, a photographer with a studio in DUMBO, visited Drift daily during the months it stood in the Archway. Burmeister, too, has long addressed erasure of history and culture through his art. Connecting strongly to the installation, he made a limited-edition, hand-bound book of photos of Drift and presented one to Ursachi, who until then was unaware of Burmeister’s project.

Canton Projects is pleased to bring together Ursachi's Drift sculptures and Burmeister's photos of it under the Manhattan Bridge. For this project, Ursachi is showing the seven original sculptures, plus an eighth made from the same cast, but gold-leafed in 22 carat gold. Burmeister is showing photographic prints on hand-made, hand-coated paper.

Leonard Ursachi

Leonard Ursachi is a Romanian-born American artist and the founder of Canton Projects.

Ursachi grew up in a dictatorship, from which he defected, and spent years border-hopping before settling in New York. He was granted political asylum by France, as well as a scholarship to study art history and archaeology at the Sorbonne.

Ursachi's art reflects our contemporary world of porous borders, vulnerable shelters, and mutating identities. Leitmotifs throughout his work are lost or buried histories; the repercussions of environmental choices; the impact of borders on cultures and individuals.

Ursachi’s What a Wonderful World, one of his “bunker” series of sculptures, is currently on view in Tribeca Park in lower Manhattan, under the aegis of NYC Park’s Art in the Parks program. It was named among the top public sculptures to see in New York this fall by both Time Out New York and artnet.com.

Ursachi’s Fat Boy, a prior bunker, was created for and exhibited at the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. It then moved for a year to Prospect Park, Brooklyn, where it was named by both Time Out New York and curbed.com as one of the best public sculptures in the city.

Ursachi has exhibited internationally, including a solo show of his art in 2008 at MNAC, Romania’s National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. Elisabeth Sussman, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has called Ursachi’s work “thought provoking and quite moving . . . dealing with an important aspect of our culture and . . . both sensitive and intelligent.”

Don Burmeister

Photographer Don Burmeister was the founder of, and Executive Editor, from 2010 – 2016, of the New York Photo Review and the owner and director of the Safe-T-Gallery in Williamsburg and DUMBO. His photographs and books are in collections worldwide, and have appeared in publications ranging from National Geographic and Harpers Magazine to the Journal of Ultrastructural Research and Journal of Neuroscience and Popular Photography.

In one photo series, Burmeister turned his lens on ancient earthworks of North America: the “Indian Mounds” and “Effigy Mounds” that numbered in the tens of thousands when the first European settlers arrived. Over the years, many of the mounds were destroyed.  Some were simply worn down by years of plowing, while others were consciously removed from the landscape to make way for the advance of roads, houses and parking lots. 

Through that series, Burmeister considered the ambiguous relationship between modern American culture and those reminders of earlier civilizations.

“I’m not interested in making pretty pictures of some imaginary past,” says Burmeister, “My interest is in trying to visualize the many layers of meaning that are present in what is essentially a pile of dirt sitting by the side of the road -- right now.”

Critic Stephen Maine, on Artnet.com, wrote, “His large, crisply detailed color photographs ... are quietly stunning.... Burmeister’s interest is clearly in the clash between the sanctity of the cemetery and the profanity of the encroaching strip malls and housing developments. The pictures chillingly capture that tension.” 

Carol Schwartzman wrote, in Wburg magazine, “[his photographs] offer a stunning context for process and the strange twists taken by time and its historical-minded bedfellow, culture. These pictures somehow grab me right in my American belly.”