Georg Gatsas: Five Points

New York’s Chinatown and Bowery has become the last resort for artists, music makers and other night dwellers to afford living in Manhattan. It’s a neighborhood that still preserves the spirit, beauty and rawness of Downtown Manhattan that has been overrun by corporate symbols, new irrational laws, a chain of new buildings which serves as the playground for hedge fund managers and their peers nowadays. The Five Points neighborhood and its close territories are still a font of creative energy for artists and musicians, a place where chaos is consistent with order, a site of cheap deli stores and Asian restaurants, a spot for hidden gambling places and whorehouses. It’s also the home and working place of many friends of mine, for example multimedia artists and musicians Lizzi Bougatsos and Brian DeGraw or avant-garde guitar player Mick Barr.

Five Points is my next exhibition at James Fuentes LLC which focuses – as the title says – on this district and its inhabitants. I will present a series of portrait pictures, combined with street pictures and landscapes, all taken either on the way to Manhattan’s last non gentrified area or in it. Most of them are shot during night time which is my favorite time to stroll around in the dimly lit streets of the Bowery and the Five Points and to work in general. Pictures that I take – for the Chinatown project and at large – are fragments of my life. They are pieces of people, friends, artists that I’ve spent time with, that inspired me, that helped me whenever necessary. These photographs provide me a vivid diary, a colorful remembrance of past times. They are also intimate glimpses into our lives which are the opposite of the general industrial lifestyle that most people are leading today. Life is about chances, risk, change, diving for pearls. I think that’s the reason why my work is posing questions and mystifying.

I have been working with slide projectors since my exhibition The Process IV at the Swiss Institute last spring and it has become the perfect medium to present my photographs. Slide shows enforce the content, aesthetics and narrative element of my pictures. An intensifying component part of Five Points will be a soundtrack, a remix by Norbert Möslang of a new band by Lizzi Bougatsos and Sadie Laska called I.U.D.

- Georg Gatsas

Georg Gatsas
Five Points
James Fuentes LLC, New York