City Fragments, a dual exhibition featuring Carol Dronsfield and Leigh Klonsky, encourages viewers to look at their urban surroundings in a different light. The Brooklyn-based artists explore and dissect familiar NYC scenes that many of us often overlook. Dronsfield zeros in on wild postings – multi-layered wheat paste advertisements, and Klonsky focuses on street trees. They photograph these everyday sights and reinterpret them using collage and mixed media, creating extraordinary, fragmented views of our city.
Carol Dronsfield started The Wild Postings Project in 2012, focusing her lens on construction site walls plastered with multiple layers of advertisements, posters, and graffiti — the more layered, weathered, and battered the walls, the better. She photographs the multi-layered remnants of the postings and adds painting, drawing, and vintage ephemera to the prints, highlighting the beauty in urban decadence.
Originally from Hartford, Connecticut, Dronsfield began her career as an art director in New York City before becoming a commercial photographer. Her current work focuses on street photography, capturing the city’s landscape and its diverse array of characters. She co-founded Exposure, The Salon for Women Photographers, in 2024. Learn more at www.caroldronsfieldphotography.com.
Leigh Klonsky’s collages are part of an ongoing series inspired by the complex and contradictory relationship New Yorkers have with street trees. Composed with more than 500 photographs of tree beds, bird’s nests, plastic bags, indoor plants, and images of humans intersecting with nature, the works reveal the love, neglect, and abuse directed toward these urban oases. Using glue, paint, and nails, Klonsky transforms her photos of the trees into mighty patchworked beings.
A native of Chicago, Klonsky received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and her Masters of Art in Education from Brooklyn College. She has been an NYC public school art teacher for nearly 20 years. Learn more at www.leighklonsky.com.
The 2026 arts programming at the Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse is made possible in part by the Brooklyn Arts Council’s Local Arts Support Grant.
