When I first walked down Quay and West Street, Brooklyn, in 1994, I landed in a poetic urban decay.
It was a place where adventurous creatives were drawn to. There, on the river front, was what seemed like a playground, a history lesson, and a peephole into the drastic cultural shifts that have occurred in New York City.
In 2016 I began documenting many of the warehouses, artists residences, studios, art galleries, and hang out spots that are now gone, replaced by expensive luxury condos. Using found objects and discarded cardboard, I created the faces of buildings. These cardboard relief facades are a documentation/record of buildings from my neighborhood, Williamsburg/ Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
In 2018, I wanted to create facades about the fire on West Street, that marked for me, the beginning of a long shift in my neighborhoods urban landscape. The Rope Factory was one of the buildings on West Street and caught fire 2006. Many other favorite buildings that were demolished on West Street are represented in the fire facade project.
It is a multimedia expression of the intensity of seeing your neighborhood change. This work is as much about urban planning as it is about living in continual change; about the past as it is our future.
It was a place where adventurous creatives were drawn to. There, on the river front, was what seemed like a playground, a history lesson, and a peephole into the drastic cultural shifts that have occurred in New York City.
In 2016 I began documenting many of the warehouses, artists residences, studios, art galleries, and hang out spots that are now gone, replaced by expensive luxury condos. Using found objects and discarded cardboard, I created the faces of buildings. These cardboard relief facades are a documentation/record of buildings from my neighborhood, Williamsburg/ Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
In 2018, I wanted to create facades about the fire on West Street, that marked for me, the beginning of a long shift in my neighborhoods urban landscape. The Rope Factory was one of the buildings on West Street and caught fire 2006. Many other favorite buildings that were demolished on West Street are represented in the fire facade project.
It is a multimedia expression of the intensity of seeing your neighborhood change. This work is as much about urban planning as it is about living in continual change; about the past as it is our future.
Installations, videos, reliefs and pinatas by Lisa Ludwig
By the New York Times
Blaze on Brooklyn Waterfront Levels Historic Warehouses
May 3, 2006
The Greenpoint fire left the streets flooded and eerie. Officials said that 350 firefighters were called to the scene, the largest response other than 9/11 since Aug. 26, 1995, when the St. George Hotel burned in Brooklyn. Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesA fire roared through a network of abandoned, historic warehouses on the Brooklyn waterfront yesterday with a speed and ferocity that challenged and exhausted hundreds of firefighters, and led fire marshals to suspect arson.
The blaze burned all day as it consumed a former rope factory on West Street near the site of the Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint, which launched the ironclad warship Monitor for the Union 144 years ago. The fire blackened the sky above northern Brooklyn with thick smoke shot through at its base with bright flames a block deep. The plume could be seen for miles.
Rope Factory Fire Facade Experimental Video Art
2018 I created a miniature facade of the Rope Factory Facade Relief to video while I burned it. |