Dear Helen: A Requiem for Disappearing Landscapes
ATM Gallery
July 5-27
Reception Saturday, July 5, 10am-2pm
Look, I'm going to tell you something weird right off the bat: every single night, I visit the same dream world. Same buildings, same spaces, same everything. It's like having a timeshare in my own subconscious. The only map I ever made of this place? Some Bard in Texas has it now, and yes, I know how that sounds... and this matters because, I'm not just making pretty paintings in my rural studio. I'm interested in how the subconscious makes places familiar and the connections objects make in rooting us to comfort. I, like many, seek comfort when things suddenly change or when big transitions are upon me, or when things are beyond my control.
When I moved to Charlotte, Vermont in 2017, I was seeking something familiar in an unfamiliar landscape and that’s when I found Helen, a black willow tree standing off-set from two distant mountains (more like hills) in my backyard. I named her becasue I needed something to ground me to this place. Not far afield is the railroad, where long ago during its construction workers dug up a beluga whale skeleton. For me, this whale is a timeless reminder that if you think you know a place? Think again, every place holds many life times and many time lines; every place contains multitutes. And for now, there is Helen. Helen is not of the past, but for this moment, this present, this time and place to optimistically remind me that we are here, and it's okay that one day we won't be.
This land was ocean, then forest, then farmland, and eventually it will become something else entirely, whether by nature or human-made intervention. But for now, I ruminate on the fact that Helen's roots drink from soil that remembers being seafloor. You want to talk about a guidepost for hope? Try having your optimism literally rooted in ground that used to be under the Atlantic.
So here's what nobody tells you about loving a tree in a place like this: everything here is transitional. I mean, we are literally witnessing the fragility of a changing landscape in both physicality and metaphor. And while places like these, whether conscious or subconscious, have become clickbait for somebody's private Instagram backdrop, underneath it all, the presence of this tree asks me to consider what those beluga whale bones whisper: This moment too shall pass.
It always does.
When I first moved to Vermont, over twenty years ago, I used to conserve/restore theater backdrops for a living; literally in-painting over the weathered cracks of performative history created by itinerant artists traveling across the country at the turn of the last century. The influence of this work took root early in my artistic practice. I have been known to combine the theatrical with the aesthetic and tangible to make giant textile sculptures, layered sounds, projected images, ie. whatever it takes to build an experiential space. Usually in these constructed spaces I try to envision a place where grief and forward motion can coexist without one canceling out the other. Where both past and present fold time, as if we just woke up from a dream and try to describe that dream using a language that doesn’t exist in conscious reality, but totally made sense seconds earlier. It's a feeling of nostalgia without being able to put into words what exactly it is about the past we miss.
Two paintings are inspiring this work: Thomas Moran's The Lotus Eaters and Johann Dahl's An Eruption of Vesuvius. In Moran's piece, we're the lotus eaters, stranded on the island, too numb to swim for the ship; aka us medicating ourselves with screens while the world transforms beyond recognition. Meanwhile, a tree stands there on her ancient ocean floor, teaching me that the real lotus flower to consume is presence, not absence.
I like volcano painting because it’s about finding beauty in destruction. Remember when the Canadian wildfire smoke turned parts of the Northeast into an apocalyptic impressionist painting (and most likely will again some time soon) That smoke made everything strange and gorgeous and terrible. It brought people together to witness an alien landscape of hazy twilight, was a conversation starter, and held a feeling of cinematic suspense. The landscape being consumed by molten lava is beautiful; the destruction comes after the eruption; a phoenix turning to ash, a landscape being born again.
This installation is about making spaces to think about how we can continue in a world that never stops changing. Can we sit with the vertigo of knowing that where you stand was once fathoms deep? If the ground beneath our feet is just another chapter in an endless story of becoming, then we can rest easy knowing that one day none of this will be here.
In the meantime, my hope is that this installation becomes a gentle requiem for the transitions we don't choose but have to live through anyway. May we move through them with the fortitude of a tree named Helen who stands where ancient oceans once were, who bends in the wind of seasonal Vermont rain and snow storms, and who is a muse for finding peace in the midst of endless change.nge.
