Canal Street Research Association

For their two-week micro-residency, Canal Street Research Association considers discourses surrounding categories of real vs fake, nature vs artifice, and native vs invasive – employing strategies of mimicry as a mode of both learning and critique, resulting in a series of poetic and surreal situations and images.

This research will continue their practice of “re-stagings,” wherein the public are invited into absurd situations that investigate a particular phenomenon we wish to better understand. These encounters are then documented through photography, creating an intriguing series of portraits that subsequently serve as conversation pieces. 

For instance, on the banks of Flushing Creek, we invited visitors to re-stage “Basin Girl,” the only female architect at the 1928 Beaux Arts Ball, who came dressed as a sink.

The artists will also use this time to create and design a small accompanying publication, perhaps as a postcard, in conversation with their collaborator, Sto Len, who they have previously worked with, to create editions of gift wrap made from his beautiful marbled works that document oil slicks that swirl on the surface of NYC’s contaminated waters.

Another form of copy as critique, these imprints of the water will live alongside the pearls, telling the story of how industry has long polluted our precious NYC waterways, destroying the oysters’ rich habitat. 

For this particular re-staging, they are considering artifice and mimicry alongside NYC histories of oysters, waterways, and buried riches — by creating a series of jewelry made up of real fake pearls. Fashioned from the semi-precious material of shimmering jelly beans sourced from the iconic Lower East Side sweets shop Economy Candy, the jewelry will be both an interactive object for viewers to don and depart with, as well as one element in an installation — a debaucherous yet elegant fiction that also brings attention to NYC's decimated waterways that were once home to the world's largest oyster reefs. 

They are developing this concept in collaboration with the artist Lydia Okrent, who originally made jelly pearl necklaces for a performance where the performers ate the necklaces off of one another. These pieces will further serve as conversation pieces sparking dialogue about New York’s history as a marshland, and the currents and currencies that make up its landscape.

BIO

Canal Street Research Association was founded in 2020 in an empty storefront on Canal Street, New York’s counterfeit epicenter. Delving into the cultural and material ecologies of the street and its long history as a site that probes the limits of ownership and authorship, the association repurposes underused real estate as spaces for gathering ephemeral histories, mapping local lore, and tracing the flows and fissures of capital. They have occupied storefronts, empty office buildings, and storage units—and are currently located in a basement under Canal Street.

The fictional office entity is operated by Shanzhai Lyric (Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky), a poetic research and roving archival unit that take inspiration from 山寨 (shanzhai or counterfeit) goods to examine how bootlegs use mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. They occupy both official and unofficial spaces including MoMA PS1, Sculpture Center, Artists Space, Storefront for Art & Architecture, and Abrons Arts Center.