Oyster Island

Curated by Lucy Hunter and Raphael Lyon
The Trap Show
Where
New York, New York
2019

In 2019 Lucy Hunter and Raphael Lyon (Where Container) curated the Trap Show a series of activations around New York City. For my part, I organized an outing aboard the Staten Island Ferry to view Oyster Island, a place that disappeared from maps a hundred years ago, but surfaces during the lowest tides of the year. The viewing party spotted the island through binoculars and a week later I visited it with the Billion Oyster Project. From Hunter and Lyon: Where is a think tank and on-demand publishing project headquartered in a shipping container in Brooklyn, New York. Our operations test the assertion that art manifests the same patterns, behaviors, and properties present in all complex informational systems. Acknowledging the powers and perils of systems-based thinking, we suspect that the mechanisms identified as producing growth and complexity in large-scale systems may be directly applicable to the field of artistic production. We use the exhibition format as a site for researching these mechanisms. Where is produced by the art historian Lucy Hunter and the artist R. Lyon.