J Jan Groeneboer's new site-specific, multi-channel video installation Selected Views marks the culmination of the artist’s durational process of witnessing fluctuations in the local and global landscape, recorded through footage of the singular view from the window of his Brooklyn studio.
The installation represents the first iteration of a project the artist has been developing since 2018. Following a period of over three years of exploratory research, photography, and writing about the view from his Brooklyn studio, Groeneboer took up a daily practice of filming over the subsequent two and a half years. The resulting footage highlights disparate elements of the cityscape that take on unexpected proximities to one another through the artist’s window: the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; The Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn; a recycling plant; an electrical plant; the Port of New York and New Jersey; the Upper New York and Gowanus Bays; and the Statue of Liberty. Attending to the presence of the architectures and systems that often are hidden from daily city life, Selected Views contemplates the ways the built environment variously conceals and reveals interconnections between democracy, global capitalism, the prison-industrial complex, and environmental crises.

For the exhibition at The Kitchen Selected Views was concieved as a site-specific installation. Groeneboer augments the video’s investigations through engagement with the ambient features of The Kitchen’s loft at Westbeth—a setting that is defined by its own vistas, visible through a wall of windows overlooking the Hudson River and West Side Highway. Through its juxtaposition of two different vantage points within the installation, Selected Views carves out space to reflect on what can be learned by looking closely at what is present in—and absent from—any given perspective of the cityscape.

Installation Documentation of Selected Views at The Kitchen