“Part of my LEIMAY Fellowship involved a presentation of my work in the OUTSIGHT Series at the Dorothy Streslin Community Garden. The work that I was cultivating had, up until OUTSIGHT, lived in the LEIMAY space. The space itself is a blank canvas. White box with marley is hard to come by in NYC and having it to create both complicated my process and enhanced it. Having such a neutral space forced my work deeper inside itself, creating something even more sensual and exploratory than I had thought was possible. Being asked to then move the work from a whitebox studio into a public garden was an important moment for me to add a new layer to the piece while simultaneously editing out what no longer felt relevant. It forced me to ask questions that my research had previously not been asked. What happens when our work is witnessed in a public space? What becomes important and what gets lost? I found that the parts of my work that I had not been able to understand either fell away completely in the garden or became fully fleshed out. Nature and specifically a garden maintained and loved by a community is a creative tool that can nurture not only the flowers and plants that grow in it but also the people and the art that live in it for a short time. Watching people walk by and stop by was really powerful. Witnessing art just like we witness the trees on the streets we walk every day both makes art more accessible and part of the atmosphere.”
– Roxy Gordon, Outsight Artist, 2019