Carolyn Hall and Clarinda Mac Low “Sunk Shore”

Open Source Gallery

This event has ended.

Open Source Gallery presents Sunk Shore, a site-specific installation and residency by Carolyn Hall and Clarinda Mac Low.

Sunk Shore is a speculative, experiential tour of our climate crisis future that takes place along specific shorelines. This project time travels into an extrapolation based on a deep dive into climate change data. Carolyn Hall and Clarinda Mac Low create an embodied experience of information, giving the facts weight and impact while looking at relationships we hold with our shorelines in playful and imaginative ways. Complex data is made personal, experiential, and relatable so that communities can create a collective and equitable response to our world and each other. Hall and Mac Low have a shared history in both dance and scientific research, and act as equal partners in a horizontal collaboration. Their methods mirror each other, with complementary skills coming to the fore when necessary. The collaborators also share a collage aesthetic, a joy in the hand-made, and a love for found objects–this comes through in the visual design of the walks, our video production, and our collections of ephemera.

In Sunk Shore, the past, including the physical configuration of a waterway as well as the varied cultures around it, serves as fodder for an invented future. Problems are urgent and overwhelming, and by working very locally, with imagination, Hall and Mac Low hope to make the facts more legible, allowing space for emotional reactions to difficult changes. Walking tours along the Gowanus Canal will dream forward to the future of our relationships with shorelines, exploring what our climate-changed future will look and feel like.

As part of Sunk Shore’s residency, Hall and Mac Low will run two workshops exploring the elements that make up a Sunk Shore tour. Open Source will host one workshop on April 30 and May 1 for community members who live along the Gowanus. The second workshop is in partnership with Genspace, the Sunset Park-based community biology lab, and their teen internship program.

This Open Source Gallery exhibit is part of a multi-pronged Sunk Shore project traveling along the Gowanus Canal and Bay created in tandem with Old Stone House and Arts Gowanus. Brooklyn Utopias: Along the Canal runs from April 10 – June 26 at the Old Stone House gallery in Park Slope. Additionally, Hall and Mac Low are both members of Works on Water and Sunk Shore is an ongoing part of Works on Water’s Triennial projects in 2022.

Carolyn Hall is a contemporary dancer and marine ecology researcher. She received her MS in Marine Science from Stony Brook University. She has performed at the Alwan Center for the Arts, Skirball Center for the Arts and Danspace Project among others. She is a board member at Culture Push, Cora Dance, and Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature & Dance.

Clarinda Mac Low received her BA from Wesleyan University in Molecular Biology and her MFA from City College of New York in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice. Mac Low is the co-founder and Executive Director of Culture Push. She is also the co-director of Works on Water, a nonprofit that supports artwork on waterways. Her work has been presented at Proteus Gowanus Gallery, ANTI Contemporary Art Festival and Center for Performance Research among others.