Written by Grace Hwang

As the Salt Space continues to define its identity as a contemporary community art space, we solicited drawings and photographs from the streets and squares of New York for a ‘community exhibition’. An initial 349 drawings and 293 photographs were collected from this unusual call for proposals asking different communities in NYC for their participation and response to the question:

"What would you draw if you had one second for every year you’ve been alive?"

Modified granny carts-turned-art carts loaded with luscious Rives printmaking paper, charcoal pencils, stopwatches, and a can of fixative galavanted about Central Park, Washington Square, Tompkins Square, (and 4 other locations) with speakers blaring a playlist to provoke curiosity if not downright disarm NY-ers from their 9 to 5 workday. Asking people to sketch one second for the amount of years they’ve been alive was inspired by an idea Noah Ramey had as he turned 12 this year and calls it, appropriately: The 12-Second Sketch.

The second part of the experiment was a photo project, the mission: "Find and photograph “purity in the city.”

‘Purity in the City’ was initially a personal photo project of Neil Brown‘s that he graciously let us appropriate on a larger scale, that involved taking 25 white balloons from Riverside Park to The Highline to Coney Island.

The installation was collaboratively designed and built in three days by a team of volunteers, incorporating a hanging system of twine weighted by water balloons. Viewers are encouraged to become participants by arranging images or contributing responses of their own. Together we are organizing and defining communities as temporal, fluid, dynamic, interconnected; based on but not limited to demographics, experiences, memories, needs.