I named the site after Kuslansky Electrical Supply, a family business founded in 1923 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It began as a metal-plating company and later became a wholesale and retail electrical supply store. Near the front, an interior doorway led 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, the store’s atmosphere of commerce, camaraderie, light, and its industrial materials, shaped who I became as an artist.

I can still recall the oily smell of BX cable as it clattered over the metallic diamond-plate floor, my father spooling it out from a giant wooden drum in the cold loading bay in back,  cutting it to measure using the abraded painted yellow marks on the burnished steel floor.

I remember the endless stocking and restocking of electrical parts along store-length shelves, a ritual of order and display that was 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.