Together in Isolation at the Re Institute. Art in the COVID-time

"I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems." -—Wisława Szymborska

What is the situation for artists, and the people who want to see art, in these COVID times? Since the shutdown, gallery openings and museum shows have been universally cancelled, blown away by COVID-19's extraordinary ability to spread.

Artists are used to isolation and solitude, but the showing of art is inherently social. An artist can work now with fewer distractions, without the hustle of planning shows and managing a presentation of self. An artist may feel this absence of the art world. Artists must make art, but how to share it? How are gallerists and curators getting around the closures? So far, there have been scattered pop-up electronic shows, and occasional outside/drive-by exhibitions. 

Henry Klimowicz, who directs The Re Institute in Millerton, has conceived of a novel exhibition, Together in Isolation, currently on view. The site for this exhibition/outdoor walking experience is the grounds of The Re Institute, a 32-acre farm/alternative gallery in rural Dutchess County.

Klimowicz initiated this show with a mass e-mailing to artists, proposing a show as an ongoing record of these COVID-19 times.  All submitted art is to be accepted throughout the duration of the pandemic. Any medium--writing, painting/drawing, assemblage, sculpture--and any subject matter--political, poetic, documentary, personal-- are fair game. Artists are asked to make a piece and place it inside a small plastic box (a "vitrine") with a clear top window, provided at cost. Klimowicz shallow-buries the boxes in the ground around The Re Institute pond and barn. Each vitrine is illuminated by an adjacent solar powered light.

This (already very large) group show has necessarily launched without an opening. Klimowicz has arranged for viewers to see the installation in low numbers, with timed entry set by online calendar. Viewers can walk the grounds following the lights, or just roam freely. The conditions set for the works and viewing are based on current requirements for social distancing. 

The works ring a pond, and spread out into adjacent land. This show is optimally viewed at dusk. At night the landscape glows from the indirect light of these underground boxes (IMAGE BELOW).

One crouches and stoops over the pieces, looking down, to peer inside. This peering is quite different from gazing at art on a wall, and the nature of the vitrine (weathering plastic, reflecting sky) may partially obscure some images. Yet, treasures are revealed--something akin to the mini-dioramas in a sugared Easter egg. There's a delight of discovery possible in viewing this show. Confessions are made and secrets are revealed, and one feels the vague shudder of looking into a crypt. And whose crypt?

Currently 55 artist's works are buried, with more pieces in preparation. As the viewer ambles and peers, subjects, themes and metaphors rise to the surface and resonate between the pieces.  Examples: 

Boats: A sieve-like boat (Kate Hamilton), a lone man in a boat (Klimowicz), a clay figure clasping 2 objects (babies?) looking up from a boat ([Katharine Umsted "Refugee"], (IMAGE BELOW).   

Social distancing: small figures casting long shadows in a socially distanced circle, (Christian Pietrapiana, IMAGE BELOW), and figures standing at a distance on a wood plank (Jouret Epstein)

 Mirrors: A work incorporating mirrors, her own blood and her kid's baby teeth (Brooke Stevens). A room of mirrors "Tomorrow Never Knows" (Brantne DeAtley)

Personal: Tender family photos, with scattered  gold flakes scraped from a decanter belonging to the artist’s mother. (Orestes Gonzales). A shattered, re-glued ceramic heart (Jerri Puerner)

Poetic: A wristwatch around a stone (Linda Stillman)  (IMAGE below). A green glitter covered "hope stone" (Kris Ketchie). A red box reflecting red clouds (Matt McGee). 

Rooms/burial chambers: A stripped nervous system in a crypt (Thomas Nousias). Nero's golden pleasure palace in Rome, after excavations of the Domus Aurea (Dean Nichols, IMAGE BELOW). This room, roofed by a golden dome, contains a Nero figure in robes hand-sewn by the artist. To the relief of many, Nero's palace fell into ruins shortly after the madman's suicide in AD 68.

Political and Documentary: Images from Queens hospital and Aleppo (Emily Rutgers Fuller).  Trump's face superimposed over an image of the virus (Eileen Coyne). "Masks don’t bother calves" (Diane Engleke). Collage with gloves and masks (Kenneth Noskin). Bronze and copper studded sphere--the virus cast in metal? (Michelle Grabner). A jarring work--"Feet First" by Kaitlin Harris. Are these Covid toes? Is this a corpse leaving feet first? Whose vulnerable soles are these? (IMAGE BELOW).

Assemblage: Several works in this show evoke Joseph Cornell's constructions. Several works elaborate found objects, including "Communication device found" (Kristen Defontes).   "Between Heaven And Earth" (Dan Devine). Some pieces are constructed from leftover remnants of prior artworks (George Spencer,  Deanna Lee).

This is an incomplete description of the artworks in this large group show, and new pieces have been made and buried as I write. I acknowledge that many worthy pieces are not included, however, this is an ongoing blog piece about this growing exhibition, and can be addended and revised during the life of the exhibit (blogsite: sandymooreartist.com, click on neck of the woods blog.) Please send any responses and thoughts through the CONTACT page).

Contemplating burrows and buried things is not new for Klimowicz. About 3 decades ago he gave me a small wall sculpture with a little mammal, nursing its babies underground (IMAGE below). Not unlike animals in burrows, we also are hiding from a mortal threat.

This exhibition is collective work, but on another level, it's a work of art by Henry Klimowicz. He developed the concept for this exhibition and the design of the boxes/lighting. He sites the works and provides the pickax/shovel labor for the burial of the boxes. His choices turn the customary manners of exhibiting art upside-down. There is no curator. There is no rush to prepare for an opening, no white cubicles, no competition, no market, no wine, no hobnobbing. Artists are not asked to price their work, and pieces are not for sale. This undiscriminating freedom is unfamiliar and exhilarating. As the CEO's of major museums and other art venues trim their schedules and furlough workers, and struggle to reopen into a leaner status quo, this exhibits blows out all the windows and doors. Not even the pretense of normalcy. 

Together in Isolation is documented on The Re Institute website by posted jpegs. There are also 30-second videos that some of the artists made; these uploaded videos provide a window into the private spaces of the artists, as well as their reasons and rationalizations for making their pieces. 

This outdoor show is in the brush, so in addition to the inescapable drone of worry about COVID, there are mosquitos, ticks and poison ivy to avoid (upstaters must needs be savvy about such things). 

The exhibition will formally end when we can get together in a large group. If/when it's safe to gather, an artist's party and celebration is planned. After this the exhibition will be dug up and stored. If in the future a venue can be found, the exhibition may be shown above ground, or reburied. The art pieces created and donated by the artists will remain as a record of meaning for this extremely strange time-out-of-time in our lives. 

That's the plan. As of this writing, despite the constricted opening of a few museums, and speed of warped minds, the duration of COVID looks to extend for quite a while.

Sandy Moore 9/8/20

Buried vitrines rimming the pond at dusk

Katherine Umstead “Refugee”

Christian Pietrapiana “So?”

Linda Stillman “Time In (Appearance)”

Dean Nichols “Domus Aurea”

Kaitlin Harris “Feet First”

Henry Klimowicz (wall piece from 1980’s)

Henry Klimowicz, Sculpting

by Sandy Moore

Henry Klimowicz is a sculptor. When he started out he fashioned objects with tinfoil, wood, cardboard, wax and other materials, but about 1986 he settled on cardboard as his "adult art medium".  He is drawn to the ubiquity and humbleness of cardboard. Most of us ignore cardboard--it's trash. Through Klimowicz's hands, everyday cardboard transcends its way into the sublime.

When I met Henry at the MacDowell Colony in 1986 he was sculpting diorama-like pieces out of cut and folded cardboard-- 2 mice exploring the world, a moose in a landscape, a man standing on the much larger chest of a woman. Many of these were painted in colors, and expressed a personal mythology based on awe. He also made an indoor loft bed planted with real grass, that a viewer could lie down on.

In the mid 1990's, shortly  after Henry moved upstate, he went quiet and did not make art for about 7 years. He had a new child, a farm, responsibilities. When he re-surfaced, he no longer used color, and no longer sculpted figures. The work leaned toward the abstract.  There was one continuity--Henry stayed true to corrugated cardboard. His tools are, consistently: glue, glue gun, box cutter. 

How does he make these pieces? Each piece starts with a kernel of an idea and builds on itself--a process of accretion much like a paper-wasp nest, or a shell.  For example, his Liken Lichen pieces start as a moebius-like strip that spirals inside, reverses itself, and continues to fills in and grow outside.  I asked Henry to point out the "start point" for his Liken Lichens-- and we stuck our heads as deep as we could into these sculptures without being able to discern a start point. So perhaps the endpoint is not known at the onset, and visa versa.  His "method for proceeding" builds on the immediate prior pieces, and is consistently repetitive, sometimes to the point of boredom (he listens to audiobooks while he works).  At the same time though, the result is always different. He does not foresee what the outcome will be when he starts. He presumes that a wasp making a paper nest, or a bee assembling the hexagons of its hive doesn't foresee or hold in its "mind" what will develop. But since we cannot know the mind of an insect, the insect becomes a metaphor, "a thing regarded as representative...of something else, especially something abstract."  Klimowicz strives to turn off his mind from the work as it "grows". He doesn't want to get in the way of the piece. He recognizes that the unconscious is at play in the repetition, in a space free from conscious theorems.

Are these works abstract? Klimowicz's titles--Circle, Rectangle #8-- are highly specific and at first seem abstract. But moving throughout these sculptures are references to figures and movement--eddies, intersecting ripples in a pond, sperm, the wild incomprehensible (but recognizable) details of nature. In his recent show at the Garrison Art Center (9/21--11/10), several sculptures raise questions of the spiritual--there are  lacy sculptures hanging in the windows which transform the incoming  light from morning until evening, like trees in the stillness of  the woods. There is a central tall piece which manages to be static and dynamic at the same time, evoking a shamanic African dancer.  

There is a spiritual quality in the work--but animism, not theism. Henry tries to create with the humility of an insect, or a craftsperson like a quilter. Klimowicz's philosophy is his technique. And visa versa.

Window sculptures, Garrison Art Center

Liken Lichen

Rectangle #8

Open Studio Event, October 2019, Hudson NY

 by Sandy Moore

On Oct 12 and 13th 2019 the first open studio event was held in Hudson. The weather cooperated, and individuals and small cohorts ambled from Washington Street to Allen, from Worth Ave to 1st St.  About 50 Hudson artists opened their studios to whomever happened in; the event was aleatory for the both the viewers and the artists.

Some of the spaces were "staged" to be sort of a mini-opening, but I found the working studios to be the most fascinating. Delectable and curious art supplies were strewn about, like they are. Studio types and circumstances ranged, some spacious, others shared and/or cramped in a NYC kind of way. The conversations that one could have with the artists ranged from politics, to flights of fancy, to serious discussions of technique.

This was an opportunity for a straight-forward look at the artwork, in situ, with the artist present. These were interactions not taking place in "white cubes", and sans curators and gallerists. The semiotics at this studio walk were one-on-one, viewer and raw art/artist.

Many of the studios were on Warren Street--up a flight of stairs. This made being a grown-up visual trick-or-treater easier. However, there were interesting differences.  I entered Sita Gomez's studio through her garden. Here there is a strategically placed painting of the wild goings-on at the St Medard cemetery in Paris--rounded women consorting. The studio itself had a faintly Parisian feel, and for a few moments I felt transported there.

Some of the studios were tucked away in alleyways. Maria Manhattan showed her extraordinary ceramic vases in a studio along an alleyway--pieces resembling the necks of waterbirds, or pitcher plants. She pointed out the other artists showing on the wall and floor of that space. This graciousness of artists directing the viewer to the work of other artists happened frequently at this event.

In the anteroom of Jane Ehrlich's space, there is a set of paintings with dark backgrounds (the depths of the sea?) with scattered swaths of bright color (creatures below the photic zone?). As you walk with her through to the working part of her studio she states, as an aside, that her new paintings are "disappearing".  These canvases have subtle background colors which recede beneath translucent, layered, crisscrosses of white. They are disappearing--maybe sunk into a chalky sediment, or wrapped in gauze, or receding into a skewed plaid fog. The fact that these paintings were created post-the bathyspheric paintings makes them all the more interesting. That kind of juxtapostion may be seen in a studio, but doesn't often make it into a gallery show unless it's a retrospective. Also, of note, Jane Ehrlich organized and masterminded this Open Studio event.

Lydia Rubio's studio is a labyrinthine archaeology of time--upstairs to diaphenous colors on large canvases affixed with clips in the hallway (recent), downstairs to black & white paintings on board (see this blog/"Tarnished Nature, Erasible Art" for more about these), and intricate hand painted books about travels. Rubio then walked us out of the studio to a garage--a hushed space with several gorgeous azure and cobalt blue paintings. There was also one large older work, The Landscape of Reflection 1999, (the night = water), depicting a mountainous landscape in Cuba. These mountains sprout a profusion of  streams and rivers, and the night sky was not just those retinal blues, but included strokes of a deliciously perverse brown umber which told the truth about the real night sky. Stunning, all the more so because of the unexpected setting. 

Just down the street, at the studio of Tery Fugate-Wilcox, were drawings and a few compact examples of his larger polygonal sculptures--geometric shapes tried by the elements. Placed about were statements of his thoughts, including "without art we are nothing but monkeys with car keys" His formal ideas are profound, his writings provocative and funny, and this  short visit  was, I hope, a teaser for a longer conversation.

There was a huge range of work, and many more studios than can be detailed in a short blog. Art studios are highly personal spaces, potentially revealing the artist's mind. A working studio is one of the lynchpins of making the art possible. The Open Studio event was good use of an afternoon well spent and afforded the privilege of seeing art in its living context. I look forward to the next one, and hope there is some way of working out caravan tours (or the like) so that the artists living in the backwoods around Hudson can likewise share their artwork and studios in this open way

Maria Manhattan, Blue Vase, Cherry Alley Studio

Lydia Rubio, Landscape of Reflection, Warren St.

Jane Ehrlich, one of the disappearing paintings, Warren St.