Dear Helen: A Requiem for Disappearing Landscapes
Installation by Wylie Garcia
July 5-27, ATM Gallery
Every night, I visit the same dream world: same buildings, same spaces, same everything. Whether awake or asleep, I'm fascinated by how the subconscious makes places familiar and how these connections root us to comfort, especially during times of change.
When I moved out to Charlotte, Vermont from Burlington in 2017, I found Helen. Helen is a black willow tree standing between two distant hills in a field in my backyard. I named her because I needed something to ground me in an unfamiliar rural landscape. Long ago, railroad workers once unearthed a beluga whale skeleton in the area, a timeless reminder that every place holds many lifetimes. This land was ocean, then forest, then farmland, and will eventually become something else entirely. Helen's roots drink from soil that remembers being seafloor; a strange but wonderful guidepost for hope.
This installation asks you to consider how we continue in a world that never stops changing. Can we sit with the vertigo of knowing where we stand was once fathoms deep? If the ground beneath us is just another chapter in an endless story of becoming, how does our own main character energy relate to the lore of this specific time and place?
My intention for this installation is that, as a viewer, one experiences little moments to reflectively get lost within. I want you to feel the burden of this moment ease within a person's admiration for a lone tree, in a field, in a valley, in Vermont. It’s a funny thing to build a shrine to a tree, but here we are.
This is a gentle requiem for transitions we don't choose but live through anyway. May we move through these times with the fortitude of a tree named Helen, who stands where ancient oceans once were, who bends in seasonal storms and who reminds us that where we stand was once ocean and that this too shall pass.
Price List
(images and descriptions of work coming soon...)
Dear Helen, acrylic on stretched canvas, $10,500
Portrait of the artist standing in the studio wearing their favorite t-shirt,
acrylic on stretched canvas, $8400
In Memoriam, mixed media sculpture with solar flowers, $450
Sacred Flame, acrylic and pencil on birch panel, $350
Flores, acrylic and pencil on birch panel, $350
Concha, acrylic and pencil on birch panel, $350
How to say i love you, acrylic on birch panel, $350
Spell-Caster, mixed media sculpture, $2500
In dreamland we are a field, video, (wip), nfs
Post Card Dear Helen, lenticular print signed limited edition of 50, $40