In Spring 2022 I made an 8-minute video about the personal quest of one of my friends: to build an encampment in the woods of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, named “The Room.” My friend explained that he’d created a space where people could be their genuine selves and feel safe. The conversation started with him describing Joseph Campbell's hero journey, the hero’s call to action, and the importance of the hero’s “noble purpose,” which in this case was his call and purpose.

The Room was a ragtag set of structures made out of string, old furniture, wood pallets, and tarps, that supported an accretion of left-behind objects. Although it was close to a main path, the space felt like its own enclave where kids hung out and people sometimes slept, leaving small tokens of appreciation, like trinkets or writings.

The video described The Room’s evolution from a single pallet and tarp to an up-cycled living sculpture, as well as my friend’s relationship with the space. Unfortunately, the story came to an abrupt conclusion when we arrived one day in the rain to find The Room entirely cleared out, with nothing left but the trees. My friend expressed his sense of loss, but also admitted that my filming helped him understand The Room’s symbolic meaning: the necessity of protecting his more vulnerable self during the Covid pandemic, then leaving that self behind. 

The project series includes the video, along with photographs, drawings and writings that tease out the change in the space and people’s relationship to it. In May 2022, I showed The Room project series in a group exhibition entitled Metamorphosis at the CUE Foundation Gallery.