As He Sees It

J Jan Groeneboer recognizes that the views from his Sunset Park studio are almost too symbol-laden. “If you were a writer and you made up this landscape, it would be heavy-handed,” the artist told a crowd at The Kitchen’s temporary gallery at Westbeth Artists Housing, describing the technoindustrial pastoral outside his window. He may have come to this urban panorama by chance when he leased the workspace, but as the title of his new video installation suggests, his methods were anything but: deliberate, even meditative, with footage shot over a two-and-a-half-year period, but also personal, as when the camera pans a little shakily or the pitter-patter of Groeneboer’s daily life is overheard.

Selected Views, whose short stint at the Kitchen concluded on January 20, unfolded across three screens. In the work, eerily beautiful skies change color because of distant wildfires, which artist Zoe Leonard, one of three panelists who joined Groeneboer for the public event, described as a “tension between the sublime and the dystopian.” Around sunset, gallery hands pulled up the coverings on Westbeth’s west-facing windows and switched on the video. The Hudson River, visible outside the windows adjoining the display, seemed almost like a continuation of the cargo ship moving its way slowly across the water on screen. Another monitor played footage of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, mirroring drivers stuck in the traffic-choked West Side Highway down below.

From Groeneboer’s window, the Statue of Liberty can be seen—at least, when it isn’t obscured by cargo ships or plumes of industrial smoke. He said he aimed for the scale of the work to be “the architectural rather than the monumental,” though he might have added infrastructural: His camera lingers on the everyday rhythms of a capitalist, carceral state—countless Amazon delivery trucks, looming container cranes, the menacingly anonymous Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

The installation incorporated a soundtrack of the BQE leveled to correspond with the dull roar of the West Side Highway, over which Ethan Philbrick performed a looping cello piece. He prefaced the performance by saying that he shared with Groeneboer the aim of encouraging “counter-attentive modes” that make a viewer look a little closer at the world around them and to think about their own position within it. Although this may seem like it could lead to despair, Selected Views suggests a radical agency in careful attention, a necessary precursor to political action.