Gina Beavers, "Tapestry Embrace," at PACS Gallery

Left to right: Gina Beavers, Washer Flo-lite, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 46 in.; Gina Beavers, She's Got Legs, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 in., in Gina Beavers, "Tapestry Embrace," at PACS Gallery, August 22, 2011.

Ultra-slim, ultra-thin, gold-tipped high heels against a chalky white background. The white outline of a washing machine floating against the ceiling in a sterile, dimly lit corporate space. A white canvas, blank except for a paint palette and a paintbrush. Those are the contents of three different paintings, all by Gina Beavers, which were included in her recent one-night show at the PACS Gallery in Williamsburg. To put it reductively, Beavers' work is diverse.

In the show's press release, Beavers explains that its title, "Tapestry Embrace," is a dish at the Zen Palate restaurant in the Theater District (its slogan is "The Art of Eating Well"), and admits that, when she was first considering the name, she didn't actually know what was in it. "I could have sworn it said … something about a wrap, and the sides of the wrap enclosing the ingredients in an 'embrace,'" she writes.

But Beavers was wrong. "Tapestry Embrace," the dish, actually features, in her words, "grilled seitan (soy) steak and shiitake mushroom in teriyaki sauce, garnished with grilled zucchini, yellow squash and a banana-leaf filled rice cone." Nevertheless, she kept the title. "Oh well." (She notes that the phrase is actually twice borrowed, having also emblazoned it on one of the posters included in Price Good Market Inc., the endearing art store that Beavers and Denise Kupferschmidt staged at St. Cecilia's Convent earlier this year.)


Installation view of Gina Beavers, "Tapestry Embrace," at PACS Gallery

A similarly curious, casual approach to appropriation operates in Beavers's paintings. In an earlier statement, she writes of her process, "I get an idea, which I either photograph or look up by typing key words into google images." Sometimes, when the internet fails, she constructs sketches of an image from memory. Regardless, she says, "I then paint as closely as I can, the original idea. If it's from a photo, I stick slavishly to the photo, in a submissive way." But Beavers is not quite as subservient as she claims; she has a definite, definable style, or at least certain notable interests. When she really wants to lay on the paint, she does so in controlled, heavy passages. Those ski-slope-steep black heels project well off the canvas, and the washing machine's outline has the solidity and thickness of a long Tootsie Roll.


Left to right: Gina Beavers, 8 Watercolors, 2011. Acrylic and paintbrush on canvas, 9 x 15 in.; Gina Beavers, Kid drawing, Seline, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

When she paints people — and this is where things get most interesting — Beavers applies color in quick patches. Line and disparate colors collide and form angles, cheekbones, faces. There's a whiff of mid-to-late Picabia in a double portrait called Observe the intention of the pose (2011) and a feint toward Eric Fischl in the gray In this nude, the sculpturesque quality (2011). (Both works are below.) They're psychologically affecting portraits, staring out at us not quite impassively.

Where are these people coming from? That nude could be from any number of paintings or films or porn shoots. But churned through Beavers's process, and placed in that epic frame, its source is obscured, though never vanquished. We know that we've seen images like this before, but we can't quite place it. I know I've seen those heels before, perhaps as a drawing on the stand of a SoHo street vendor or sitting, just as shoes, in a friend's apartment. She has also copied some drawings that are, according to their titles, by children. (One is above.) They look like the work of Joe Bradley.


Gina Beavers, Observe the intention of the pose, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 38 in.


Gina Beavers, In this nude, the sculpturesque quality, 2011. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 26 x 32 in.

However obscure the sources of some of Beavers's images may be, the roots of her titles are, at least, not in doubt. The two mentioned above come from a 1942 textbook called Anyone Can Paint! From some artists, that buried reference would read as raw sarcasm ("no, most people cannot paint") or a snide remark ("yes, true enough, but they shouldn't"). But coming from Beavers, who borrows and reworks images — across genres, media, and styles — with a care and peculiarity that I can only read as somehow deeply personal, I'm tempted to understand it as an optimistic exhortation, albeit one with an edge. "Anyone can paint!" she says. Cue that blank painting. "Now, what will you have us look at?"

All Falls Down: Sam Falls and Nick van Woert, "Death Valley," at Cleopatra's

A work by Sam Falls, at Cleopatra's, Brooklyn, in "Death Valley," with Nick van Woert.

Even as I type this, the two paintings that Sam Falls has on view at Cleopatra's, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, are being torn apart, transmogrifying in slow motion. Both works are monochromes in the loose tradition of Arman: translucent, wall-mounted vitrines filled to their brims with found materials — apples in this instance, red and green.

But there is another material locked inside those boxes: live worms. They are silent and almost invisible from across the gallery, but up close one can see them clearly as they slither quickly around the fruits, waiting for them to rot, for the opportunity to break their skins. It is a grotesque sight.



Falls is planning to feed more apples to the worms throughout the exhibition, until the wall of fruit is replaced by a wall of waste, the colorful monochromes turning the dry brown color of soil. Only at that point, in a sense, will the paintings will be complete. (Will they need to be tended and watered like Walter De Maria's New York Earth Room?) Perversely, these finished products will almost certainly lack the laid-back, easy beauty of their original state.

For now, the works embody organic, natural processes, and are marked with the rare distinction of being paintings that have the potential to fail — literally and completely — in public. The worms could die. The waste could slip through the seams of the vitrines. The smell of the accumulated effluvia could simply become too intense to endure, forcing an evacuation of the gallery that would make Robert Barry proud.


Fans by Falls

For now, though, everything appears to be going according to plan. Falls has even kindly provided portable fans that he has painted into kinetic Kenneth Nolands, classy tools for braving these summer days, or just for clearing the air if his paintings become too pungent as they are composting.

Work by Nick van Woert is here, too, at the front of the gallery: a series of thin plastic containers that he has filled with household substances like mouthwash, sugar, and cleaning liquids, perfectly cold, synthetic partners to Falls's naturally decomposing display.


A work by Nick van Woert

The Price Good Market Inc. at St. Cecilia's Convent

Denise Kupferschmidt and Gina Beavers, Price Good Market Inc., in "Art Book Club Presents:," at St. Cecilia's Convent, Brooklyn, June 3, 2011.

"This past June … the hordes of half-wild, half-crazed, and fully degenerate individuals who keep pouring out of the 42nd Street subway had occasion to check out a whole building full of art that was just as raw, raucous, trashy and perhaps even as exciting as some of the more notorious attractions of the tenderloin," Jeffrey Deitch wrote in Art in America in 1980. He was reviewing the now-infamous "Times Square Show," for which dozens of artists, led by Cara Perlman and Tom Otterness, used a four-story building on the corner of 41st Street and 7th Avenue for — to quote Deitch — "a month-long party, business enterprise and loosely curated exhibition of art, film, fashion and exotica."

Of Deitch's descriptors, it's the twin notions of a "month-long party" and a "loosely curated exhibition" that have congealed to form the show's storied legacy. "Several dozen of the organizers, participants and hangers-on virtually lived at the site for the show's duration," Deitch writes. Moreover, there were numerous performances and film screenings, alongside work by soon-to-be superstars like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and SAMO — the graffiti name of Jean-Michel Basquiat and friends. (Deitch described SAMO's work in the show as "a knockout combination of de Kooning and subway spray-paint scribbles.") But that other phrase, "business enterprise," is equally important. As Deitch himself says, this wild, unruly show had a gift shop, filled with affordable artist multiples. "To the right, a souvenir shop was stocked with all sorts of bizarre trinkets," he notes.



Let's jump forward 31 years. Earlier this month, the "half-wild, half-crazed, and fully degenerate" denizens of the New York art world had the occasion to see a whole building full of art once again. The site this time was the three-story St. Cecilia's Convent in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, instead of an abandoned massage parlor in Midtown, and in place of Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab), this show was organized by the Art Book Club, which handed over each of the three floors to a different curator — Fran Holstrom, Saira McLaren, and Carolyn Salas. And, once again, there was a gift shop, the Price Good Market Inc., which was helmed by artists Denise Kupferschmidt and Gina Beavers, which offered small works by many of the shows' participants at bargain prices.

Kupferschmidt and Beavers cited as their inspiration The Shop, the East London art boutique and bar run by Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas in 1993, which was included in Tate Modern's 2009 "Pop Life" show. Emin writes, in a piece published in advance of that show: "The recession was in full swing with hundreds of empty shops boarded up. Sarah and I looked at each other, more or less at the same time, and said, 'Let’s get a shop.'" They sold hand-made merchandise, like mugs and T-shirts, as well as small, affordable pieces by other artists. (The bestselling shirt, at least for a period, read "Complete Asshole," writer Gregor Muir mentions in this lively interview with a late-arriving Emin.)

Price Good Market Inc. had hand-painted works of their own: signs emblazoned with declarations like "NICE TO FEET YOU" and "NEW THING ARE HERE" alongside papers with more ambiguous messages — "ON THE RUN" and "TEQUILA SKIN," for instance. Cheap, store-bought jewelry hung next to a bright-yellow one-piece bathing suit by Beavers, a paper construction by Stacy Fisher, and a necklace and pillows by Sam Moyer. The décor was pure strip-mall class: bright fluorescent lights hung up above and wraparound walls were lined with black electrical tape or painted with quick black lines, mimicking perfectly the omnipresent plastic sheeting that fills malls across the land. It felt like a slice of suburban American — or, to put it another way, childhood memories of many of the show's young attendees, myself included — had somehow slipped into this defunct convent.





The Price Good Market Inc. was, of course, more a glorious gag than a workable business: would-be buyers at the Friday-night opening were turned away and told to return on Sunday, the lone day that the shop was open, and the prices were in some cases absurdly low. It was an excuse to show work, see friends, spin some records, and drink beers. However (and I know this will sound simplistic and perhaps naïve), in an economy that is only now slowly recovering after the failure of massive, complex financial instruments, the opportunity to exchange a few bucks for a handmade sign or a Sam Moyer net necklace sounds just right: radically straightforward and accessible. A lot has changed in the three years that have elapsed since Takashi Murakami placed another kind of gift shop, a miniature Louis Vuitton boutique, at the center of his Brooklyn Museum exhibition.



More: Martin Bromirski has tons of photos from the opening of "Art Book Clubs Presents:" at Anaba and on his Flickr account.

Asher Penn, "2005," at Ground Floor Workshop, Brooklyn

Installation view of Asher Penn's "2005" at Ground Floor Workshop, Brooklyn, New York, June 3, 2011.


An Inspectah Deck T-shirt: Gang Starr, "Above the Clouds" (featuring Inspectah Dek), 1998

New York–based artist Asher Penn is one of today's most interesting — some might say most flagrant — appropriators. He has used magazine images in paintings, adorned portraits of Kate Moss with Rorschach blots, and bedecked skateboards with Diane Arbus photos. (A show of those latter works was canceled after Arbus's estate objected.) In his latest exhibiton, at Williamsburg's Ground Floor Workshop, Penn steals from more low-key sources. One wall of the unusual corridor space is lined with extra-large T-shirts — thrift-store finds — hanging on long wood dowels, a method of presentation borrowed from Hermann Nitsch, who often hangs his effluvia–soaked robes in the same way after performances, Penn explains in the press release. Along the other wall are crayon rubbings the artist made against a stretch of sidewalk carved, in long, bold strokes, with the number "2005." "My first guess was that someone graduating from High School did it," Penn writes. Attacking his paper with bright patches of color, he captures one anonymous gestural act in the process of creating another, a copy as mysterious as its original.




Free Bert: Hockey player Todd Bertuzzi, who was suspended from the NHL in 2004 for punching an opposing player, Steve Moore, from behind.





Asher Penn, "2005"
Through June 19, 2011
Ground Floor Workshop
327 Grand Street
Brooklyn, New York

"Control Alt Delete": A One-Night HKJB Show in Bushwick

Graham Collins in "Control Alt Delete," curated by HKJB, at 840 Broadway, 4th Floor, Brooklyn, New York, May 27, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

The official start of summer may still be three weeks away, but HKJB, the curatorial nom de guerre of artists Benjamin King and Jay Henderson, has already delivered what feels like the first show of the season: a one-night-only affair held last Friday on the fourth floor of 840 Broadway in Bushwick. It was, for one thing, gorgeously hot up there. My camera fogged up for a few moments as I tried to photograph the revelers, who were keeping cool with large, cold beers bought in the bodegas below. More to the point, though, the show, "Control Alt Delete" (a Windows reference from the art crowd!), had the raucous, anarchic spirit that we expect of the city's summer shows, with roughly fifty works by fifteen artists installed around the premises.


Matt Jones

A few participants had enough work on view to fill entire solo shows of their own, like Wayne Adams, whose trademark paintings of repeating chevrons were installed around the walls of the room. There were also two small ones leaning against a wall and an enormous one, ominously titled Ask Me No More Questions, Tell Me No More Lies, hanging off the side of a column. Matt Jones had a bounty on offer, too, mostly paintings that were propped up like sculptures and scattered around the floor. (Jones has already produced a book of photos of the show that he snapped with his iPhone; its available in a full-color or a thrifty black-and-white edition.)


Stacy Fisher

Though brutally outnumbered by the painters, the sculptors (or, at least, the sculpturally-minded) fared well. The California transplant Ernesto Burgos delivered on the promises of the work he showed at Kate Werble Gallery at the beginning of the year. His best piece (partially pictured below) was a curiously crumpled sculpture balanced against a wall that features an image of a hand proffering a stiff-looking cocktail. Yes, please! He also had two wall-hung constructions — one silver, one black, both sleek — that looked like immaculate, high-gloss seat cushions.


Left to right: Ernesto Burgos, Vince Contarino, Benjamin King

A new name for me: Graham Collins, whose painted slab of wood on top of a cinderblock (pictured at top) was a welcome moment of smart, quiet presentness, matched in that regard only by work of a trusty established name, Stacy Fisher, whose intimate black constructions held their ground impressively, tempting viewers to touch them.

With so much work placed on the floor and hung low on the walls, there were ample opportunities to admire the paint-splattered floors, the slow, steady work of Lauren Luloff and Tisch Abelow, who both use the space as their studio and had work in the show. Luloff offered a large painting (pictured below) with sections of bunched-up fabric — filled with white-on-dark-green leaves and snakeskin prints of umber, amber, and ocher — that abutted a swath of flowing, potable abstraction, all smooth grays and tans that almost tilted into peach. It looks like two or three or maybe four pieces seamlessly spliced into a single work, a multitude of divergent ideas operating in unison — not a bad metaphor for any successful group show.


Lauren Luloff


Top row: Ernesto Burgos, two paintings by Halsey Hathaway; middle: Wayne Adams, Ernesto Burgos, Wayne Adams; floor: Matt Jones


Matt Jones


Tisch Abelow


Floor left: partial view of Brion Nuda Rosch; center: Maria Walker; right: Wayne Adams




Lauren Luloff


Lauren Luloff


Lauren Luloff in the stairwell

Excepting the paint-bedecked floors, the joyous heat, and the strange indoor garden, the best part of the temporary, makeshift gallery may have been that it was on the fourth floor, meaning that twice — coming and going — visitors received a bonus show in the form of stairwells lined with art, mostly large canvases holding their walls against the streams of people visiting friends and eying their latest work.


The stairwell of 840 Broadway

Previously: HKJB's first show, "Personal Abstraction," held in May 2009, out in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with the likes of Jim Lee, Wendy White, and Chris Martin.

Georgia Sagri, "Μοντέλο της Αντιγόνης," at Real Fine Arts

Georgia Sagri, Hold on to your Ego (stolen song title from...?), 2011. Forged steel chain, master lock, garbage cans, in "Μοντέλο της Αντιγόνης," at Real Fine Arts, Brooklyn, through May 15, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles.


Center: It rained milk yesterday outside the city, 2011. Painted foam core, garbage can lids, chain, milk, leaves, flower petals, granola bar wrapper, dimensions variable. Margins: Detail of Four crosshatches and two lines, 2011. Semi-gloss paint on floor and wall.

Google Translate renders "Μοντέλο της Αντιγόνης," the title of Georgia Sagri's recent show at Real Fine Arts, in English, as "Model Julia." However, working one word at a time, it offers "Model of Antigone," which is likely a more accurate rendering since the show's press release includes, in large capital letters, the phrase "ANTIGONEMODELL 1948." That's the name that Bertolt Brecht gave to his version of Sophocles' tragedy, Antigone, which he adapted from a translation of the play by Friedrich Hölderlin. Those three names — Sophocles, Hölderlin, Brecht — are included in the release, too, each situated beneath an image, two of which are identifiable as screenshots from Yorgos Javellas' 1961 film version of the play. (The source of the third is a bit more mysterious.) There is, to put it mildly, a lot going on here.

There were garbage can lids inside the gallery — one held in the air by an old grey chain, hovering as if it were covering some phantom can, the others resting on a slice of foam core painted a rich purple, deep burgundy in its densest sections. There was a pool of milk inside one lid, and the checklist promised that leaves, flower petals, and a granola bar wrapper there also there, though I couldn't spot them. Its title is It rained milk yesterday outside the city (2011), and it is one of the most wonderfully strange works of art I have ever seen. Outside the gallery, Sagri offers something of a companion work (or is it the site to It rained...'s non-site?), wrapping a heavy gold–colored chain around a pair of garbage cans, threading it through a D-ring screwed to the gallery's front stairs and securing the whole contraption with a lock.


Unethical nests #1, 2011. Blue dog transporter, bungee cord.

The show spilled out still further into the neighborhood, sneaking up onto the steel beams beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where Sagri strapped down three dog transporters without their cage doors and titled each Unethical nests (2011). They easily blended into the surrounding structures, until you spotted them and couldn't believe no one had raised some questions about those strange plastic crates perched high above the ground. They could be concealing security cameras, one might think, or harboring explosives or serving some other devious purpose — harming animals, if one chooses to believe one possible reading of their titles. But they're just sitting there, empty and innocent.

What all of this has to do with the Antigone plays — or, for that matter, Antigone, the character, the woman, the shining role model of civil disobedience — is not at all clear. Sagri presented a performance on Thursday, May 12, which I'm embarrassed to say that I missed, so there may have been some clues there. (The estimable Flickr user thefuturistics has photos.) Regardless, she has left us with a set of bewildering objects and situations: a local, homespun site/non-site construction in the form of the two garbage can works, a lofted architectural intervention (with vaguely sinister overtones), and a handful of other peculiarities, including a one-minute PowerPoint show and a modestly sized, jerry-rigged Liam Gillick sculpture.


Unethical nests #2, 2011. Brown dog transporter, bungee cord.

In an intense interview published in Idiom, Sagri tells Alex Kitnick, "Also I am more interested [in] peripheral actions, the unexpected ones, the hidden when it is exploded, the unreasoning." That's roughly how I think about "Μοντέλο της Αντιγόνης": as a series of strange, quiet, even invisible gestures, and some that seem entirely unreasonable in their flouting of popular reference and easy access. I like what's going on here in an indistinct, unintelligible way, but I can't pretend that I understand it.

The chained garbage cans, at least, have a clear title: Hold on to your Ego (stolen song title from...?). The answer is the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, an oblique nod, perhaps, to the dog crates installed across the street. The song title to which Sagri refers, "Hang on to Your Ego," has its own obscure history, having been changed to "I Know There's an Answer" in order to conceal its apparent reference to hallucinogenics. It opens with the lines: "I know so many people who think they can do it alone / They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zones." These are not words that could be sung of Sagri and her myriad, ambitious projects. That said, however filled with potential, the periphery provides its own innate form of safety. I want to know what a Georgia Sagri show would look like in a big, plush contemporary art museum.

"In Back of the Real": Around the International Studio & Curatorial Program

Carolyn Salas, Second Sight, 2011. Wood, transparent vinyl, paint, dimensions variable, at the St. Nicks Alliance, Jennings Hall, corner of Bushwick Avenue and Powers Street. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.

— Allen Ginsberg, "In Back of the Real," 1954

Around the corner, more bursts of color, more floating planes.

"Are you looking for the speaker?" a middle–aged man asked me as he walked into the Powers Street Garden in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on May 15. I certainly was looking for the speaker. I had been standing at the entrance to the garden for four or five minutes, helplessly trying to find the Uri Aran audio piece that a map I had picked up at the nearby International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) building promised was playing in the area. "It's right over there," the man said, with a kind but amused smile, pointing to the corner of the park, just a few feet away. "It goes on occasionally. Just wait for a minute." He paused to listen. "There it is now."

A dispassionate man's voice was emerging from that leafy patch of the garden, filled with low trees and green bushes. "The mongoose, the hen, the cow," he said, naming a long series of animals. "Head lice, rats, mice, cockroaches." There were two lists, one of "good animals," the other of "bad animals," the pamphlet with the map explained, a guide to Turkish-German curator Necmi Sönmez's exhibition "In Back of the Real," titled for the eponymous Ginsberg poem, which brought the work of nine artists to the ISCP building and the streets that surround it.

"The neighborhood is characterized by an enigmatic relationship between its manual laborers and artist community, with an 'invisible border' between economic production and the artistic imaginary," Sönmez writes in the pamphlet. To put it more simply, it is a neighborhood in the process of gentrifying, where automobile repair shops and community gardens sit alongside hip new bars and, as Sönmez notes, a former factory that has been converted to house studios for an international cast of artists. Like the Art Production Fund's current "Murals on the Bowery" project, Sönmez's show feels like an inevitable step in the very transformation that it seeks to address.


Tanja Roscic, Rosarium, 2011. Textile sculpture, 14 x 7 1/2 ft., on Saint Nicholas Roman Catholic Church, on Olive Street, between Powers and Devoe Streets.

Sönmez's transformation was fleeting. The exhibition was on view for only three days, March 13 through 15, and most of the works carried a light touch. Some were very thrilling temporary additions, like Carolyn Salas' Second Sight installation — translucent vinyl rectangles that she painted with angular planes of color and hung along a fence at the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Powers Street. The panels oozed with strong–willed joy, even underneath Sunday afternoon's grey sky, even dappled with dewy moisture left by the morning's rain. Tanja Roscic's fourteen-foot-tall Rosarium was similarly majestic, hanging with restrained glory on the side of Olive Street's Saint Nicholas Roman Catholic Church. If I lived in the neighborhood, I wouldn't mind seeing those two pieces every day.


A painting of Jesus that was not part of the exhibition.


Luisa Rabbia, Emergence, 2011. Textile and porcelain, dimensions variable, in the Olive Street Garden, corner of Olive and Powers Streets. A locked gate meant that viewers could only see the work by peeking through the surrounding metal fence.


An intricate mosaic, also not part of "In Back of the Real."


Katie Holten, Nature, 2011. Paint on metal, 22 x 60 in. on All About Automotive, 319 Devote Street.


Ana Santos, Untitled, 2011. Thirteen painted MDF boards, 30 x 50 in. each, on ISCP Building, along Morgan Avenue.

Thirteen yellow boards hovered mysteriously on a wall of the ISCP building, each adorned with a black triangle that seemed to be slowly fading away. They could have been mistaken for now-indecipherable signs of some forgotten industrial project. Reed Seifer (whom 2010 Armory Show visitors may recall as the artist hawking $25 bottles of an an elixir called Spray to Forget) addressed the industrial site even more directly, plucking a stone from ISCP's courtyard and installing it inside its gallery, where the show continued. Seifer filled in the empty space in the courtyard with Herkimer diamonds — also known as double-terminated quartz crystals — that were free for the taking.


Faded geometric abstractions — Ellsworth Kellys or Blinky Palermos or naval flags — disappearing in the rain.


Gereon Krebber, Out of Site, Out of Mind, 2011. Color tape, 30 feet long, at the ISCP loading dock.




The mass of tape from above, viewed from the building's second-floor gallery.


Reed Seifer, Neither Didactic nor Pedantic, 2011. Cobblestone and Herkimer diamonds, dimensions variable, in the ISCP Gallery and courtyard.

Sönmez writes that these cobblestones may have served as ballast for ships as they journeyed to the New World in the 1600s, before being converted into material for the courtyard. According to an English inscription printed on some of them ("PAT'D JUNE 17 / 84"), the stones may have been in use in one form or another in the 1680s, when control of the community moved from the Dutch to the English — an earlier and even more radical transformation of the area than the one now underway.