Embodied Sediment:
Lenses from Dead Horse Bay
For eighty years, Barren Island rendered New York's dead horses into glue. The shoreline later became a landfill that now erodes into the tide, releasing old bottles alongside fragments of horse bone. Justin Ginsberg and Anna Riley collected broken twentieth-century glass from the surf and ground optical lenses into it, returning discarded fragments to glass's oldest role as an instrument of sight. A lens vanishes into what it shows; these hold their history in view. Pressed to the eye, each directs attention toward the object, through it, and back onto attending itself. The pair used the lenses in a presentation on attention, community, and curriculum, and later developed a three-channel video of viewers squinting toward focus.
In collaboration with Anna Riley
Presentation and attention practice, Robert M. Minkoff Foundation Academic Symposium, UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, New York, October 24–26, 2019
Refuse / Reuse
Dimensions variable
Found glass from Dead Horse Bay, ground and polished
2019
Justin Ginsberg and Anna Riley
One hundred fragments, each with an optical lens ground into its surface, were handed out to symposium attendees as devices of attention. Each participant was encouraged to keep theirs.
View through ground optical lens
Participants of the symposium engaging in an attention practice, consisting of prompted silent looking at one another and their surroundings