Georg Gatsas first visited our gallery at 35 Saint James Place in lower
Manhattan soon after we moved in. When we met we discussed his practice
and I was compelled to share with him what I was learning about the
history of the neighborhood in which the gallery is located. This led him to
a six month long undertaking which he eventually titled Five Points.
My interest in the history of lower Manhattan was inevitable because
remnants of the beginnings of modern New York are evident at every turn.
Despite having grown up in the city, I had somehow never been situated
in a neighborhood where history was so apparent. Through this newfound
interest I compiled a small library, and one book stood out as something
that might interest Georg Gatsas, who was a curious Swiss artist new to
the Chinatown area at that time.
He quickly connected the dots.
He realized that this very neighborhood was one of the last refuges for
artists ‘downtown'. His project to document artists in the neighborhoods
surrounding the gallery was prescient because of its ability to place itself
within the neighborhood's history, as well as the history of how it is documented.
Gatsas' New York creates a trajectory of images going as far back
as Jacob Riis' How the other half lives, whose photographs of the blight of
this neighborhood (made possible by the invention of flash photography)
prompted city officials to tear down most of the Five Points between 1885
and 1895.
What makes Georg Gatsas' work particularly significant is that it is a
historical document. This approach puts the art back into artifact. Now
we are looking at his images much in the way others must have looked at
images of people in the same places over one hundred years ago. I enjoy
imagining someone like Georg Gatsas in one hundred years looking at the
book you are reading now, I wonder what they might have to say or might
be able to learn about these places, people and things.
