DMYCC by Sean Vegezzi documents the artists’ decade-long engagement with a cavernous underground area constructed beneath Lower Manhattan. It is one of several tunnel segments built in the 1970s by the New York City Transit Authority for the Second Avenue Subway, a convoluted and controversial subway line that was proposed as early as 1919, and partially realised in 2017. After the initial construction of the tunnel segment, the space was quickly overlooked, and prior to its discovery by Vegezzi, the phantom-like provisional enclosure lay in a state of non-use and deterioration. DMYCC is an initialism that encompasses the physical space itself, the desire to gain access to it, and a shifting roster of efforts to install and enact a private recreational domain within it. Presented in book form as a loose chronological narrative, the images in DMYCC eventually form a comprehensive mapping of the territory; ranging from early evocative analogue photographs of youthful explorations through to video stills, receipts, and architectural floor plans; concluding with full-scale photographic surveys that challenge bureaucratic structural reports in both detail and formal composition. 624 pages, 29 x 20.5cm, softcover, Loose Joints (London)
