ARTISTS
Wijnanda Deroo: Out on the Street: The Dining Sheds & Empty Streets of New York, 2020-2024
Deborah Bell Photographs presents Out on the Street: The Dining Sheds & Empty Streets of New York, 2020-2024, an exhibition of color photographs from two series made in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo. This is the photographer's second exhibition with the gallery.
Deroo is well known for her meticulously composed photographs of interiors, in which people are usually absent. Her earlier series from the 1980s-early 2000s, such as Amsterdam Hotels, Artists' Studios, Atlantic City, Brooklyn Night, Cura莽ao, Disappearing Houses, Lower East Side, Mobile Homes, and New York Eateries, acknowledge human presence without showing a single person.
The art historian Molly Kalkstein aptly describes Deroo's recent work:
Deroo presciently embarked on her systematic documentation of New York's dining sheds at what turned out to be a transitional moment, a few months before the city began demolishing abandoned sheds and formulating a more permanent plan to regulate and standardize outdoor dining. Deroo's photographs...thus stand as documents of an era that is already receding, and of a landscape on the cusp of another transformation.... Trees, scaffolding, and apartment buildings loom over the sheds' roofs. Shop fronts and yellow cabs peep through their windows. Locked bikes, signposts, mailboxes, and parking meters vie for space outside the sheds' entryways, while parked cars nose up to their walls. The dining sheds appear as rooms within rooms, floating stage sets squeezed into a few feet of available space as the city continues to jostle around them.... Even uninhabited, early in the morning or late at night, these sheds take on a range of personalities, and embody the spirit of their respective neighborhoods.
The absence of people also takes on a new valence in the wake of the pandemic. At its height, COVID-19 emptied the streets of pedestrians and vehicles alike.... Deroo documented this moment as well, in her 2020-21 series of New York streetscapes eerily deserted in broad daylight.
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Deborah Bell Photographs presents Out on the Street: The Dining Sheds & Empty Streets of New York, 2020-2024, an exhibition of color photographs from two series made in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo. This is the photographer's second exhibition with the gallery.
Deroo is well known for her meticulously composed photographs of interiors, in which people are usually absent. Her earlier series from the 1980s-early 2000s, such as Amsterdam Hotels, Artists' Studios, Atlantic City, Brooklyn Night, Cura莽ao, Disappearing Houses, Lower East Side, Mobile Homes, and New York Eateries, acknowledge human presence without showing a single person.
The art historian Molly Kalkstein aptly describes Deroo's recent work:
Deroo presciently embarked on her systematic documentation of New York's dining sheds at what turned out to be a transitional moment, a few months before the city began demolishing abandoned sheds and formulating a more permanent plan to regulate and standardize outdoor dining. Deroo's photographs...thus stand as documents of an era that is already receding, and of a landscape on the cusp of another transformation.... Trees, scaffolding, and apartment buildings loom over the sheds' roofs. Shop fronts and yellow cabs peep through their windows. Locked bikes, signposts, mailboxes, and parking meters vie for space outside the sheds' entryways, while parked cars nose up to their walls. The dining sheds appear as rooms within rooms, floating stage sets squeezed into a few feet of available space as the city continues to jostle around them.... Even uninhabited, early in the morning or late at night, these sheds take on a range of personalities, and embody the spirit of their respective neighborhoods.
The absence of people also takes on a new valence in the wake of the pandemic. At its height, COVID-19 emptied the streets of pedestrians and vehicles alike.... Deroo documented this moment as well, in her 2020-21 series of New York streetscapes eerily deserted in broad daylight.
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