Island-related photographic art of Arthur Tress will be exhibited this month and next at a Manhattan gallery (see below).  They had a unique genesis, which Tress describes in materials accompanying the exhibit:

“The chance discovery on New York’s Welfare Island one afternoon in 1984 of a boarded-up, five-hundred-room training hospital filled with half a century’s worth of discarded municipal medical equipment came as a unique opportunity for me.  My last still lifes had become more grandiose in their combination of graffiti-like painting with sculptural forms.  Over the next three years, climbing in twice a week through a broken second-floor window, I converted the vast operating and emergency rooms into my own working studio and private museum.  I completed more than sixty room-sized installations from the basement locker rooms to the rooftop sanitarium.  Wearing a protective mask and using canned aerosol colors, I developed elaborate spray stencil techniques on assemblages of iron lungs, X-ray machines, incubators, blood sampling machines, and rehabilitation baths and transformed those rusty horrors into Kafkaesque kindergarten furniture.  In the dim gray light they seemed like ancient and sacred grave offerings for my own mausoleum.  During all the time I was working no one ever discovered me using the building or came to see the actual pieces.  The building has since been torn down, and the only record of this strange obsession are the photographs.”

The photos will be on display from April 22 through May 29 at:

Hunter-Fox Gallery
35 East 67th Street, 4th Floor
Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.