July 24 - August 1:  Paul Lloyd Sargent
 
Hydronym: Erie Basin Meets Erie Basin
 
Standing in the windows of the Red Hook Ikea, looking out over the Brooklyn waterfront, one sees vestiges of a shipping industry dating back hundreds of years. The manmade harbor here, curiously titled “Erie Basin,” takes its name from a long history connecting Brooklyn and New York City to Albany, Central New York, and Buffalo, as well as ports deep within North America and all over the world.
 
Hydronym: Erie Basin Meets Erie Basin is an audio/visual tour of the remnants of Brooklyn’s international shipping industry, tracing links from this Red Hook harbor to its namesake in greater New York State, U.S., and world history through field recordings, research, and imagery of waterfronts from Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Hudson River, the Erie Canal, Lake Erie, the St. Lawrence River, and more.
 
The Hydronym: Erie Basin Meets Erie Basin project was begun in conjunction with artists Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown’s locative media project BIKEBOX (premiering July 16th through 25th at Brooklyn-based Devotion Gallery). Designed initially as an audio-only, geo-coding smart phone application for tours of Brooklyn’s Erie Basin, I will be using my stint in Mary Mattingly’s Flock House residency to expand Hydronym to include visual media elements captured this spring during travels around Western and Central New York. Hydronym: Erie Basin Meets Erie Basin is a new research initiative in an on-going examination of current and historic North American waterways and shipping routes. Drawing historical associations from the Brooklyn waterfront to international shipping traffic on the St. Lawrence Seaway, the underlying purpose of this project is to connect New York City with its surrounding geography, hydrology, ecology and economies.
 
Paul Lloyd Sargent is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and video editor living between Brooklyn, Syracuse, and Wellesley Island, NY. Embracing a contemporary amalgam of emerging media, experimental geography, community organizing, sustainable culture, and environmental activism as art practice, Sargent’s work investigates the impact of the international shipping industry on the ecologies, economies, and communities along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River.