An aging Polaroid of a bedroom closet in a temporary summer sublet in Ridgewood, Queens where I lived during the summer of 2010. 

I had just finished my first year of art school in Glasgow, Scotland and had moved back to New York City for the summer to take a part-time temporary gig at MoMA PS1, where I had been employed the previous years. The pay was shit and there was very little I could afford. I found an incredibly cheap sublet—a tiny bedroom in a shared apartment with a friend-of-a-friend way out in Ridgewood, Queens; a ten minute walk from the Fresh Ponds M Train stop. 

I slept on a blowup mattress on the floor that would tragically deflate in the middle of the night. On nights that it felt way too hot to sleep on plastic, I’d find my way to the loveseat in the living room near an open window for a bit of breeze. I now understand this to be bad manners—falling asleep nearly every night in a common area of a shared NYC apartment. My roommate (the lease holder) made it clear in a variety of unspoken ways that she didn’t want her morning coffee ritual compromised by the presence of a sleeping stranger less than 10 feet from the stove. We never formally talked about this, and I continued to find my way out to the couch on nights that felt too difficult to sleep any other way. I don’t know why I resisted buying a fan; was it because I couldn’t justify the twenty-five dollar purchase on a $13 hourly salary, or that I did not want to be bound to an additional object in my temporary renter’s world? Aside from the blowup mattress, the only other items in that bedroom were inherited by previous occupants, a random assortment of plastic and wire dry cleaning hangers in the closet. 

My NYC summer of 2010 was chaotic. I was in my mid-twenties and life was mainly lived in constant transit between work and nights out focused on art or music or the spaces in between. I have very little surviving documentation from this time, save for a few Polaroids I took of places and people I passed through, some of which I have since misplaced in moves between different apartments and cities. I had purchased a Polaroid camera that summer (I guess I valued the camera over the comfort of a fan) and was very precious about taking pictures because the film was so expensive. I don’t remember when this photograph was taken, but imagine it was captured at the end of my occupancy.

A few years back, I had the not-so-brilliant idea of laminating this Polaroid in plastic, a process that I believe caused a purple discoloration to form around the perimeter of the image. I have since removed the lamination encasement and have come to love this color cast on an image that continues to degrade with time.

I used this Polaroid as the exhibition image for a show at the Mak in Los Angeles in 2023. At the time I had been thinking about my relationship to architecture through my relationship to real estate and my still-unfolding narrative as Renter.