Underwater New York published work by me, novelist Mateo Askaripour and poet Bernard Ferguson for their Spring 2022 issue that chronicles our personal relationships with Brooklyn waterfronts. We were also asked to present a talk that expands on our work at Brooklyn College Library in March. I created the painting above, Among the Pilings, that inspired by Steeplechase Pier at Coney Island and the mermaid that I imagine rests below.
Excerpt from the press release,
Brooklyn-born Whit Harris also found inspiration in Coney Island’s waterfront. Her painting “Among the Pilings,” set under the Steeplechase Pier, invokes Coney Island’s layered history, mystery, and identity as a popular site of leisure. The painting’s accumulated, overlapping brush strokes conjure the historical Pier—vanished into the water at the turn of the century; its successor destroyed and repaired after Hurricane Sandy—and the imagined world of a mermaid. Growing up in New York City, Harris recalls submerging in her bathtub like a mermaid, a figure she now sees as “non-normative,” able to “undermine shame.” Harris brings these realms together in the painting, suggesting the “tumbled, churning” experience of living in New York, where, as she puts it, “things are constantly…washing in and out.” The blues and greens in her painting similarly swirl, undulate, and move, beckoning the viewer’s eye to follow, immersing us in her mermaid’s undersea New York. There is a push and pull in her painting, an ebb and flow, accomplished with a limited palette that is rich in shade and tone, creating depth, light, and movement. There is an oceanic fluidity and spontaneity to her composition.
Following the tangled swoops and swells of Harris’s marks, there are surprises: an unexpected pop of purple, an encounter with a fish’s eye, a near-glowing luminous stripe right at the bottom edge. These little jolts bring a sense of play to the painting, recalling how Coney Island has served, and still serves, as a place of communal delight. Often a break in routine for New Yorkers, visiting the piers and boardwalks of Coney Island can be synonymous with pleasure. Harris has memories of enjoying Steeplechase Pier with her family both as a child and as an adult. She references the “simultaneity of experience,” a collapsing or recombining of time in the layers of her work. The painting blends research, pop culture, personal history and iconography, and fantasy, inviting the viewer to think of the lives of the objects and beings—the mermaid, but also fish, a bell, a skull, and the ocean itself—beneath the surface of the water, while at the same time considering what is above: Steeplechase Pier. A public pier, suggests Harris, offers a broad view not only of what’s “out there,” but a place to stand and look back at where you came from.