60 THE QUEENS COURIER • BUZZ • SEPTEMBER 19, 2019 FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT WWW.QNS.COM
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Willets Point-based artist uses urban decay as his medium
BY MAX PARROTT
mparrott@schnepsmedia.com
@QNS
Zbigniew “Joe” Zolkowski grabbed a
discarded hose from a pile of rubble as
he approached the hole in the gate blocking
off 36th Avenue in Willets Point and
hung it around his neck like a scarf.
About fi ve yards away, a Department of
Housing Preservation and Development
sign read, “Anyone who remains on
unlawfully upon these premises will be
prosecuted. Punishment includes up to
one year imprisonment.”
Undeterred or perhaps unaware of the
sign, the conceptual artist Zolkowski
slipped behind the fence to what he
deemed his studio — an abandoned lot
leading to a swamp.
“I can’t let an opportunity like this go
by,” he said.
Out of the parties to be aff ected by
the city’s erection of gates surrounding
the southern part of the Iron Triangle,
Zolkowski is an outlier. When the scrappy
installation artist fi rst started coming
to the auto shops in Willets Point to fi x
his car, he fell in love with the sense of
“urban decay.” So he turned an empty lot
containing swampland into an art project
using recycled parts from the surrounding
chop shops.
Now his installation is locked in legal
Photos: Max Parrott/QNS
Zbigniew “Joe” Zolkowski stands next to a hole
in fence at 36 Avenue in Willets Point.
purgatory.
When the city erected the gates early
in July as part of its ambitious plan
to transform the southern portion of
Willets Point into a megadevelopment,
Zolkowski got locked out of the lot he
had been using as an improvised studio
space.
While HPD’s street closures are fi nancially
hurting the shop owners who
remain in the Iron Triangle and cutting
them off from emergency response services,
Zolkowski on the other hand hasn’t
let them stop him from returning to his
work.
“Artists always have no studios, no
places to work. Th ey’re always scrounging,”
Zolkowski said. “It’s a nice space
because I like to work with the environment
– the things that are being thrown
out here that you fi nd in the street.
Robert Rauschenberg called them
‘come by’s,’” he said.
“Th e Golden Pond,” Zolkowski’s sculpture
on 36th Avenue, rises about 10
feet out of the swamp muck. He fashioned
an altar in the shape of a cross
out of recycled shelving, light fi xtures,
exhaust pipes and other metal tubes that
he spray-painted gold. Towering over
the swamp at the top of the altar, sits a
gold-coated baby doll.
Zolkowski said that when the city sent
bulldozers to fl atten a diff erent part of the
Iron Triangle where he had built another
altar they refused to level his piece out of
superstition.
“Th ey don’t want to touch it because
they thought it was voodoo. Th ey thought
if they disturb it that ghosts would just
descend on them. So it’s sitting there with
everything else graveled up with bulldozer.
Th ey don’t touch it. Th ey said there
were animals sacrifi ces — all kinds of
things,” he said.
Shortly aft er saying that he let it slip
that he had placed the mummifi ed
remains of a dead street cat at the top of
that altar.
From its abundance or discarded and
decaying objects, the landscape of Willets
Point puts Zolkowski’s eccentricity on
full display. He said that he wades regularly
into the muddy bog in order to work
on his art. He even produced photos of
an art piece he did that involved him
coating his entire body in the black mud
from the Willets Point swamp.
In 2008, city-commissioned tests of
Willets Point soil found it to be tainted by
carcinogenic toxins and dangerous levels
of lead and mercury in the groundwater.
Zolkowski is a skeptic. He claims that
the water is healing — that it will change
your whole personality.
Despite having a very diff erent outlook
on the land, Zolkowski said that he’s
become close with the mechanics in the
area. On Aug. 31, he came in solidarity to
the meeting of nearby auto shop owners
who are organizing aft er the street closures
hurt them fi nancially.
Asked if he is worried that the city will
inevitably develop over the land where
his art sits, Zolkwoski said he is, but that
he will just have to adapt. Unlike the
mechanics, Zolkowski can always fi nd
another abandoned section of the city to
build his recycled art projects.
“If I don’t have this, I have the street.”
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