line on the pavement

We are excited to announce that on June 1, 1stdibs At The New York Design Center will open Ground Rules, the debut photography exhibition by our very own Dru DeSantis. The exhibition, which runs through July 31 at The New York Design Center, 200 Lexington Avenue in New York, features nine striking black-and-white photographs of Manhattan street surfaces.

Dru shared some insight into her inspiration for the exhibition:

My fascination with the almost painterly abstraction that can be achieved through the art of photography is reflected in these black-and-white pigment prints. Uncropped, unretouched and on an exceptional scale, the images can yield great surprises, indeed, they take on a physicality that sometimes hints of danger.

What intrigues me about life in New York is the evidence of human interaction on the hard asphalt surface. I want my photographs to reveal the continuous building up and wearing down of boundaries, the imposition and the tearing down of order, all of which is encapsulated in a few square feet of pavement.

Eye-level is the perspective from which most people view the world, but not for me. I spend a great deal of time walking and observing the pavement below my feet, looking closely. What I discover in the pavement echoes the wonderful chaos of New York, so I decided to start photographing this unobserved world beneath my shoes. The process felt like a journey of discovery. There were so many poetic moments to be found and recorded. I wasn’t focused at all on the people or the traffic, but rather on the indications of the wear and tear they left on the ground, and on the evidence of the effort to repair and remedy that wear and tear.

Ground Rules, the first in an on-going series of art exhibitions highlighting Manhattan street surfaces, opens to the public on June 1 to July 31, at 1stdibs At The New York Design Center, 200 Lexington Avenue, New York. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday.

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