“New Town” explores how humans make environments out of ecosystem, capitalizing Nature as an othered resource. This is a cyclical web of a story spun around Newtown Creek — a four-mile water border between Brooklyn and Queens, one of the longest continuously settled areas on the continent and among the fastest growing today. Here, ecology bears industry, fossil fuels and spills, waste transfer and scrap, junkspace and placemaking, and still — with each new wave of development—the loaded promise of renewal.
Working between magical realism and ecological noir, straight photographs and found text, Kirk collects traces of the uncanny to question a familiar future. Though rooted in a particular location, this place is not site-specific. New Town is where we will all reside — an entangled cosmos where everything co-evolves, where permanent plastics swim with the fish, where humanity produces to consume and humans consume to live, and where hyperobjects transcend as eternal mystical monuments.