This is an old post from June 27, 2010, but it is one of my favorite Tide and Current Taxi reportbacks.
“I met Constance Hockaday in Dumbo where she was doing a project about the waterfront… She wanted to explore the banks of the East River, and agreed to meet me just an hour after sunrise when the tide was heading North.” Words and photography by Marie Lorenz
Do you already know about Tide and Current Taxi? “The Tide and Current Taxi is a rowboat taxi in the New York Harbor, operated by the artist Marie Lorenz. Each trip is planned to coincide with strong tidal currents, all documented here with pictures and stories.”
Constance Hockaday on the East River. Photo by Marie Lorenz
I like this post because it brings together several of my favorite artists: Marie Lorenz and the Tide & Current Taxi, Constance Hockaday and their various brilliant pieces, and a few of the members of Mare Liberum, the Brooklyn-based art and maritime education collective. Plus it is a completely charming chronicle of a perfect day on the water. (Plus, I’ve been on these waters myself.)
This particular post has a picture-sentence-picture-sentence cadence that reminds me of the picture books I used to read my kids. The more than ten years of reportbacks from Tide and Current Taxi are usually as simple, for the most part letting the photos speak for themselves.
Daybreak is my favorite time to be out on the water;
no waves or wind and not another boat in sight.
Connie was visiting from Portland where she had just completed a degree in Participatory Community Development and Visual Art.
We ‘met’ online when she sent me pictures of a beautiful raft that she had made in Portland.
She was inspired by the Floating Nutrinos, who docked for a while in her home town when she was young.
“They changed my life.” she said.
Constance Hockaday “is a Chilean American visual artist who grew up on the water in Port Isabel, Texas, 5 miles from where the Rio Grande River dumps into the Gulf of Mexico. She has created outsider maritime projects for more than 15 years, from a boat hotel the Guardian called “a New York City success story” to a floating peep show bobbing in the San Francisco harbor that highlighted the loss of spaces for the Bay Area’s queer community. Hockaday began working with boats at a young age.”
Mare Liberum some of whom Marie rendezvouses later in this post is a Brooklyn-based collective that has been “hacking the Free Seas Since 2007.” The term is a little older than that, and comes from a book in Latin on international law written by the Dutch jurist and philosopher Hugo Grotius, first published in 1609. “Finding its roots in centuries-old stories of urban water squatters and haphazard water craft builders, Mare Liberum is a collaborative exploration of what it takes to make viable aquatic craft as an alternative to life on land — and as a way to make visible the overlooked and the neglected, in particular the often toxic waterways of our cities.”
Read more from the ten years of Marie' Lorenz’ Tide and Current Taxi.