Troy, N.Y.- After the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, Colleen Mulrenan waited two days for her father come home from his job as a deputy chief for the New York City Fire Department.

When he did return home to Warwick, an hour north from Ground Zero, Mulrenan did the only practical thing she could think of: She began to clean by hand his work shirts covered thick with soot and debris since he needed a clean uniform for the next day.

Mulrenan, an MFA student in electronic art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, N.Y.), documented her experience in a video titled “Daughter, September 13.” The video, largely of Mulrenan washing her father’s shirts in a sink, will be featured in riverrun, an exhibition of film and video works presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Minetta Brook, a nonprofit arts organization also in New York City.

The exhibition, featuring Mulrenan and five other artists, will be projected onto the facade of the 110-foot-tall Holland Tunnel Ventilation Building in New York. Mulrenan’s video is the only work in the exhibit that represents the emotional impact of the World Trade Center tragedy.

Nightly screenings run Sept. 21 - Oct. 4, from dusk to 10:20 p.m., at the Lower Manhattan Waterfront, Pier 34. The displays are free and open to the public.

Mulrenan’s four-minute video also incorporates sampled sounds. At first, one hears the scrubbing of laundry. Then voices of emergency crew talking via scanners and radios fill the background. Toward the end, voices of children begin to sing in Spanish, welcoming home the surviving firefighters.

“The terrorist attacks of Sept.11 affected me in profound ways,” Mulrenan recalls. “Washing my father’s shirts took hours. They were covered in ash and dirt. A part of me wanted to leave the shirts dirty, to tuck them away somewhere. I knew that some of that ash was not just building materials and cleaning away the remains seemed wrong. Another part of me wanted to scrub all of the dirt out so that I could erase some of the pain that the attacks created. Most of all, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. My father came home.”

Contact: Jodi Ackerman
Phone: (518) 276-6531
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