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Drug dealers lived downstairs.
Their dogs patrolled the hallways.
The bodegas were oases of comparative calm.
(I bought single Marlboros for years as I tried and failed to quit smoking.)
Others had a cat curled up in the window, taking a nap between mice hunts.
You might pay through thick plexiglass while a couple regulars sat on plastic crates and looked at you askance.
Or laughed and talked in Spanish.
These were not necessarily places you lingered in.
But we wouldnt have survived without them.
The bodega has since become an object of soft-focus nostalgia.
She is untethered to any one medium, as comfortable with collage as large-format portraiture.
Her work stretches beyond this moment in both directions, the past and the future.
Bodega Run is like entering a grocery store of the mind.
Everywhere in Selfs show you could sense a tension.
The edibles and joints sold by legal and semi-legal weed shops are now as ubiquitous as the bodegas themselves.
This is not quite how it was.
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