As a start to the Dumbo Arts Festival, No Longer Empty worked with exteriors of buildings and mounted an exhibition in a vacant gallery space. United under the title of “Watch This Space”, both the exhibition and the mural works alluded to Dumbo’s industrial past as well as its current process of gentrification as the area remakes its image and purpose.

Working with the scaffolding, which surrounded the buildings in Dumbo at the time of the exhibition, Chris Stain’s works portrayed hauntingly photo realist images of New York crowds in gritty, urban scenery to elevate a sense of the working class hero.

In the gallery space at 55 Washington Street, NLE installed a site-specific exhibition, which united the outdoors with the inner space again referencing the intensive construction of Dumbo in its march to gentrification.

Cal Lane creates “soft” or delicate images through “hard,” industrial tools. For instance, the artist has carved floral lace patterns into gardening shovels and car doors and carved intricate tapestries from oil drums.

The interdisciplinary quality of Alexandre Arrechea’s work reveals a profound interest in the exploration of both public and domestic spaces. He creates wry comments on the rapid expansion/demolition of cities mediating between the two impulses with his own push-pull sense of artistic negotiation.

Alejandro Almanza Pereda transforms the most basic objects from daily life or construction sites into poetic ruminations, which often seem to defy the laws of gravity. At once playful and conceptually strong, the viewer is compelled to see wood chips, crates, cinder blocks, or fluorescent bulbs as aesthetic entities capable of transcendence.