NATE DORR & NATHAN KENSINGER

ADMIRAL’S ROW 1864 – 2016

In October 2019, artists Nate Dorr and Nathan Kensinger created a guerilla video installation at the Brooklyn Navy Yard titled Admiral’s Row, 1864 – 2016. This installation was a memorial to a lost utopia that once stood inside the gates of the yard. For the last four decades a wild forest had grown unchecked in and around the abandoned mansions of Admiral’s Row, becoming an important six-acre green oasis along Brooklyn’s otherwise industrial waterfront. Unfortunately, one species’ utopia can be another species’ dystopia, and despite the efforts of historic preservationists, the buildings of Admiral’s Row had been left to become collapsing ruins. In 2016, this century-old forest and eight historic mansions were bulldozed, to be replaced by a Wegmans grocery store and parking lot, in an area that some politicians have described as “a food desert.”

Admiral’s Row, 1864 – 2016 was originally projected onto one of the new buildings of the grocery store campus, during the grand opening of Wegmans in 2019. For Brooklyn Utopias: 2020, the artists are exhibiting a new version of this video installation, including their footage and photos of Admiral’s Row from the last decade. During multiple visits from 2008 to 2020, the artists documented the old homes and forest before their demolition, and the new corporate landscape of asphalt and glass which replaced them.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nate Dorr and Nathan Kensinger have been collaboratively documenting the waterfront of Brooklyn for the past 15 years, ​photographing and filming all of the powerhouses, sugar refineries, and other historic structures that have vanished from the landscape, to be replaced by new glass towers. ​Their works investigate New York City’s rapidly changing coastline, where frequently flooded neighborhoods are now being demolished to make way for either new marshlands or new mega-developments. As the city contemplates how to best address the existential threat of sea level rise, their works excavate its complicated history, while considering visions of a multi-species future shaped by water. ​Their collaborative video works have been exhibited at the Radiator Gallery (2015), Queens Museum (2016, 2016, 2018) and Works On Water – Governor’s Island (2019).

Dorr is a photographer and filmmaker whose work explores the many margins of greater New York, coastal and otherwise. His film and photographic work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the Queens Museum, and in numerous galleries. From 2013 – 2019, he served as curator of the New York-based Imagine Science Film Festival. A current drawing series, Disaster Landforms, forms a speculative survey of the post-anthropocene.

Kensinger is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses photography, film, installation, curation and writing​.​ ​His photographs have been exhibited by the Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, and in numerous galleries. His films have screened at film festivals worldwide, including Slamdance, Black Maria, Fantasia, and Rooftop Films. He is currently the curator of Chance Ecologies.