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. The business closed its doors in 1964.

I chose the name not simply to honor a family business, but because only years later did I understand how deeply the culture of my family, and the store’s atmosphere of commerce, camaraderie, light, and industrial materials, shaped who I became as an artist.

I can still recall the oily smell of the BX cable and its metallic clatter across the diamond-plate floor as my father spooled it out from a giant wooden drum in the cold loading bay in the back of the store, measuring and cutting it to length against the abraded yellow marks on the burnished steel.

I remember the endless stocking and restocking of electrical parts along store-length shelves, a ritual of order and display that now feels almost curatorial, like arranging artifacts in an eccentric museum.

But it was the lighting showroom that held the real magic for me. It was a theatrical world of illumination and wonder, aglow 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.