MUCK!
and the Discovery of a Place We Call "The Wishing Well"
by Miriam Rorquel-Salinas
Sometime in 2005, I got to know two people who eventually became partners in an ongoing urban art project called "The Wishing Well," an attempt to fill every floor tile and out-of-the-way nook of an abandoned business in Montclair, New Jersey with colorful and otherworldly designs.
Those two people are Everett and Liam, and the discovery of The Wishing Well is much more a credit to them than it is to me. They say the initial discovery was just a product of being bored enough in the right place at the right time. It's impressive the extent to which their boredom took them that day, however, as one must enter an unlocked back door in the abandoned section of the South End business park, walk down the hall, turn left, and then turn right down another hall before coming to the abandoned showroom that has come to encapsulate the project.
The project took form soon after discovery. The three of us were going to the business park several times a week and tagging. We decided to call ourselves "MUCK!" one day while creating a tag of the prehistoric link between fish and amphibians. The name came from a conversation in which one of us misspoke "primordial soup" as "primordial muck." It seemed to carry a sense of emergence, as did the tag. Like real-life muck, the name stuck.
As the namesake tag would suggest, the aesthetic of the project harkens to fantastic and prehistoric creatures. Harpies, ghosts, Bigfoot, and a yet-to-be completed brontosaurus adorn the floor and shelves of the room. Plans to acquire a ladder for the walls and ceiling are under way, but it will be some months before the project is complete.
Eventually MUCK! wants to rent out the space in which The Wishing Well is housed and have legitimate public exhibitions of the project. Although we're not sure if this will be possible or not at the moment, for now we're sharing it in photographs and stories of its making. At the very least, we'll be able to enjoy the space as a sanctuary while we work. We're constantly amazed at it becoming more of a reality and less of the fantasy its two-dimensional inhabitants would suggest.
