I named the site after Kuslansky Electric Supply, a family business founded in the 1890s in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It began as a metal plating company and later became a wholesale and retail electrical supply store, connected by a doorway to a lighting showroom in the building next door.  It closed in 1964.

I named the site not simply to honor a family business, but because only years later did I realized how deeply the culture of my family, and the store’s atmosphere of commerce, camaraderie, light, and industrial materials formed who I am as an artist today.

I can still recall the oily metallic smell and the sound of the BX cables rattling across the diamond-plate floor as my father spooled them out from giant wooden drums in the cold loading bay in the back of the store, measuring them against the abraded yellow marks painted on the burnished steel, then cutting them to length.

And the chime of the endless stocking and restocking of electrical parts on store length shelves like a curatorial ritual of arranging artifacts for an exhibit in an eccentric museum.

But it was the lighting showroom that held the real magic. It was a theatrical world of illumination and wonder, with glittering chandeliers, floor lamps, and wall sconces arranged in a frozen constellation. Along one wall, O-gauge Lionel trains waited for departure, their miniature passengers poised for passage.

Long before I had the visual language for it, I understood that light could shape atmosphere, that objects could carry drama, and that space and current could feel alive.