Nancy Marks
I grew up in Queens, New York and spent my high school years tromping around the city as if it were my backyard; in 1986, I arrived in JP and continued this exploration. This enduring interest in the urban environment, steeped in its aesthetic and social paradoxes, is the foundation for my choice to live in the city and in my visioning as an artist.
Over the years, I witnessed neighborhood changes under the influx of development opportunities. How does constructed space separate or bring people together? What makes a community and what tears it apart? Urban life inevitably involves navigating between conflicting goals and aspirations; each block is covered with layers of phantom architecture in the form of past occupancies, aborted projects and rising up new directions.