Josh Safdie (b. 1984, New York) is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores the heightened textures of contemporary life, particularly the people, objects, gestures, and visual languages of New York City. Moving fluidly between observation and invention, Safdie has developed a practice rooted in an intense attention to the material world: vernacular design, advertising, clothing, architecture, signage, sports, and the accumulated visual debris through which people construct identity and desire.

Safdie’s practice is shaped by an impulse to gather, preserve, and organize the cultural artifacts and histories that surround him, approaching his native New York as a vast and continually evolving archive. His first fine art print, produced with Two Palms, takes the form of a highly personal ranking of the greatest New York City films.

He took blue cardstock, cropped it to a size he thought would suit 10 films, and set out to make the definitive list. The card is headed TOP 10 NYC FILMS. As Safdie describes it: “It’s 112 of the top 10 NYC films.” Titles kept arriving. They are spliced-in the way a scene is cut into a locked edit, the running time unchanged, each new entry encroaching on the titles already settled. Letters shrink, words hold their breath, a film makes itself small to squeeze between two others. The pens are ranked as well as the films: a Sharpie does not correct a Micron, it outranks it, and a title gone over in the heavier hand has been promoted. Highlighters circle classes of film in three colors that are not explained.

His criterion is less about where or how a film was shot than whether it captures what he calls the “essence of NYC”: a specificity of place that can evoke a particular street or neighborhood, a smell or a feeling, or the sense that the world on screen continues just beyond the frame. Street shooting may contribute to that feeling, but it is not a requirement; what matters is the ineffable sense of recognition and romance that connects a film to his experience of the city. In transforming the handwritten list into a print, Safdie enters a lineage of artists who have made list-making a form of art. From On Kawara’s records of everyone he met and Ed Ruscha’s cataloguing of gas stations along Route 66 to Joe Brainard’s I Remember, these artists have turned lists, inventories, classifications, and systems of notation into subjects in their own right.

Built from a twenty-color silkscreen with collage, rubber stamping, crackle paint, varnish, and hand painting, the work preserves and amplifies the physical character of Safdie’s original document rather than smoothing it into a uniform reproduction. Changes in pen, marginal additions, crossed-out and reinstated titles, and layers of correction remain visible, while three distinct treatments of white-out - hand painting, collaged paper, and crackle paint - give different moments of revision their own material presence. Shifts between matte and gloss further articulate the varied surfaces of the original. Part classification system and part self-portrait, the work transforms the familiar act of making a list into a layered record of taste, memory, revision, and Safdie’s enduring engagement with the cinema and culture of New York.