Jos Prol collects driftwood from the waters of Gowanus. He carves and dresses them to express ideas of who they are, where they came from and the place where they have arrived. He seeks to explore the identities of the natural and the artificial through edits of form and additions of image and color.

Hard to pinpoint a moment but ever since I began paddling out into Gowanus Bay several years ago, the sight of solitary, floating branches gave me a sense of empathy and perhaps a little melancholy. I saw driftwood as a solitary traveler. I wondered how long it had drifted, what and where its life had been and what storms, depths, encounters with marine life, boats and other shores it had experienced. I wondered about the story. The sculptural thought was not immediate but one that grew over time seeing the same individuals regularly that had washed up at our dock. Significance of color has an origin but evolves over time for me. I began with a consideration of the object needing a face that expressed its travel, arrival and experience of time. RGB as a starting point is fundamental for me in this series of work, referencing its seaborne past: Port, Starboard, Aft (memory of water) as well as its arrival into a technology-saturated world (the three color filters of a screen). I used 4 subsets in each of these families for a total of 12 colors. Cutting through a tree reveals a synopsis of its history, its rings. I'm drawing inspiration from this and telling an abstract new time-story. These three families of color have grown to represent new cycles of time for me as well — greens of sustained growth, blues of stasis-cum-drift and reds of crisis and opportunity. This meaning has become part of my carved pixels and inspired my paintings.