To New York With Love, a show of new work by filmmaker and artist, Jonas Mekas, opened this past Friday at James Fuentes LLC on Delancey St. The gallery was packed full of people trying to find a comfortable place to watch the two films, Orchard Street, 2010 and World Trade Center Haikus, 2010. Both films are intimately obsessive and personal. The shaky clips of The Lower East Side, Mekas's brother and the Twin Towers come together in a nostalgic viewing of a past New York, revealing our inability to alter how its changing personalities and physical transformations affect the lives of the people living within its structure. “Looking through my finished and unfinished films, I was surprised how many glimpses of the World Trade Center I caught during my life in SoHo. I had a feeling I was Hokusai glimpsing Mount Fuji. Only that it was the World Trade Center. The WTC was an inseparable part of my and my family's life during my SoHo period from 1975-1995. This installation is my love poem to it. My method in constructing this piece was simply to pull out images of the WTC from my original footage, while including some of the surrounding scenes. To New York With Love will be on view until October 31st. http://www.jamesfuentes.com/main.html
