Miss Gowanus by Meg Belichick:
New York; 1996. Photo Credit:
Brooklyn Historical Society.
ooks on loan from the Brooklyn
Museum of Art approach contemporary issues of environment, gender and self
through the form and content of the work. Many of them are interactive,
requiring the reader to remove pages in order to read or view images. In
this way, the reader becomes conscious of the reading process.
Less-than-traditional materials have been used in Miss Gowanus, a work created and printed by Meg Belichick in 1996. Like the Gowanus Canal, this book is made of organic and inorganic materials. Its cover is embossed sheet lead and the pages are made alternately of gray-tinted photographs of the canal and thin sheets of latex. Miss Gowanus traces the evolution of the Gowanus Canal, which lies between Belichick's home and studio in Brooklyn. The title of the book refers to the inaugural ceremony in 1911 for the Flushing Tunnel and Sewer System, at which a young woman wearing a white dress and tossing flower petals from a barge into the Gowanus Canal was hailed a MissGowanus." From 100 copies printed of the book, this is copy number 40.