I am interested in the presence of real estate advertising in Brooklyn’s public spaces: the billboards and posters seen on construction sites and on newly-completed luxury high-rise buildings, which commodify a self-contained, privatized and removed lifestyle in contrast to their diverse, fluctuating public surroundings. My use of car windows, roofs and mirrors as framing devices suggests the rapid pace of development and a feeling of detachment from our surroundings as a result. It also suggests parallels between Brooklyn’s new high-rise communities and suburban car culture's homogenizing and isolating influence.

My pieces in Brooklyn Utopias? juxtapose fragmented Brooklyn streetscapes with contemporary and historic real estate ads. I draw and paint these images onto flat wood assemblages from construction and furniture debris, to symbolize the fragility of a half-built urban landscape as economic recession persists.

“Sunroof” combines views of old and new structures in DUMBO and Park Slope, as well as billboards and posters advertising new condos under construction, as seen through a skewed car sunroof. The borderline apocalyptic and sublime color palette is based on 19th Century Hudson River School and Western Frontier paintings—an homage to past artistic conventions of “Utopian” landscape-painting--and the saturated hues of construction site tarps, ads, and scaffolds.

- Katherine Gressel