With 280,00 square feet of exhibition space, a visit to North Adams’ museum of contemporary art may cause first time visitors a longing for roller skates and a compass. The cavernous site recently unveiled new works by New Yorker Marc Swanson, Virginian Lily Cox-Richard and Missourian Amy Hauft. The atmospheres of the works range from the haunted and the playful to the cosmic. We were joined in a recent walk through with the exhibits’ curator and the museum’s Director of Exhibits, Denise Markonish.
A “sort of infinite party” Marc Swanson works in multimedia and his two-gallery show titled “A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco” is an ambitious, and somewhat spooky, ode to a lost era. Disco is synonymous with mirrors, glitter and rhinestones, so expect to see lots.
“He likes the way they catch light in different ways,” Markonish said. “It creates a room that is very active. The discos had mirrors and lights to create this sort of infinite party. He’s sort of conflating all those things here.” In the 1990s, Swanson was involved with San Francisco’s flamboyant gay club scene, yet eventually felt as unconnected to it as he had to his small town New England upbringing.
This memorial is, in part, a meditation on how AIDS devastated the gay community and how global warming is progressively altering life on this planet.
From ersatz icicles hanging from branches to frozen white draperies suggesting phantom forms, the installation suggests solemnity. The bleached images are made from dipping bandage cloth into plaster, so you have to work quickly.
“It’s a material he really likes because it has this ghostly, frozen-in-time aura,” the curator said. In discussing the exhibit, Swanson said that, as inspiration, he’d found his greatest spiritual connection to be with the nightclubs of his youth and the woodlands where he now lives.
Serendipitously, when he moved to the village of Catskill, New York he found that a view from his property was a favorite of the landscape painter Thomas Cole (1801 – 1848). He was the founder of the Hudson River School, the first major art movement in America. Infinitely quotable, (“We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out is our own ignorance and folly.”) Cole was a proto-environmentalist and abhorred the Industrial Revolution. In his time and long after, ice was harvested from the Hudson for the city, altering the landscape with buildings and equipment. With mylar icicles, tree branches, dioramas and foam forms used for modeling in taxidermy, Swanson provides an amalgam of images for reflection.
Lily Cox-Richard, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, is both childlike and profound in her exhibit titled “Weep Holes.” The term has nothing to do with emotional dungeons. Primarily used in masonry, it’s a hollow allowing the escape of moisture from behind a wall. “She started with the idea of what would it take in the future to abate and clean up the mess left behind,” Markonish said.
As a symbolic beginning, she‘s created a two-story high Shaker broom with “backer rod” doing stunt work for more conventional straw. The thin material is similar to pool noodles and is used in construction as sealant is applied to seams.
Nearby is an operable toy drone ornamented with chandelier glass, the creation of which came to Cox-Richard in a dream.
“She was wondering, ‘How do you demilitarize an object?’” Markonish said.
You’re not alone if you don’t immediately grasp the artistic connection, however, a few paces away and weighing in at 1,200 pounds, is a robust mass of tinsel.
While working as an artist in residence at a recycling project in Philadelphia, the artist became intrigued with the plastic monolith, which sparkled in sunlight and was highly adoptable. For Cox-Richard, there’s an animated whimsy in connecting the drone to the tinsel mass. “She said that the tinsel bale just sits there, but all it wants to do is fly,” the curator said. “Whereas the drone, all it wants to do is rest. So they see in each other what they don’t have.” When the drone does fly, you can also hear the purring of a cat.
The artist also created a short video, informing you that the one of the uses of metal tinsel was as a radar-jamming gimmick during WWII. (Dropped at altitude from planes, people would find the shiny material on their lawns and use it as Christmas tree decorations.)
Cox-Richard is clever in recycling spent materials to create images. Tomato cages become 12 pointed starbursts, accented with bamboo and kudzu weed. Discarded fire hoses are woven together to create a wall. Near that wall plaster mushrooms sprout from the tops of columns.
For sleuths of any age, Cox-Richard has also hidden more than a half dozen round niches in the walls, created by impressing the surfaces with a woven basket.
Now an instructor at Washington University, Amy Hauft had been Cox-Richard’s teacher at Commonwealth. Her three installations titled “700,000:1 | Terra+Luna+Sol” takes on the cosmic. The ratio is a conjecture as to the odds of a person being struck by a meteor. (The odds, however, were pointless for an Alabama woman, Ann Hodges, who was injured in 1954 when a fireball smashed through her roof and glanced off her radio. It’s the only reported case of both a person and a radio being struck by a meteor.)
Hauft was impressed with director Lars von Trier’s 2011 gloom and doom film “Melancholia.” In its opening scenes there’s no dialogue and, as earth declines, people are trapped. The artist, however, has created a much happier landscape, a convex surface of artificial turf with a middle walkway and a sky of blue chenille.
“All of Hauft’s work is about our physical interaction with things,” Markonish said. She added that the artist’s intent is to consider “what it means to be on a rock in a galaxy hurtling through space.”
A few paces away, ascend a stepladder and through a porthole you can look into a reversed Moon. You view the inside of an orb with a lunar surface. The acoustics are excellent if you have a song in your heart or a brief poem to recite and there’s another feature; because there’s no reference point, the surface seems to move, as an optical illusion.
For the Sun, an intricate glass chandelier, detailed with drooping flowers and gold leaf, was created in Venice and assembled at the museum. Although it normally takes eight minutes and twenty seconds for sunlight to reach us, here it’s dazzling and immediate.
“We found the brightest bulbs we could without shorting out the circuit,” Markonish said.
With a half dozen buildings, newcomers to MASSMoCA will discover a cornucopia of visual ideas, both indoors and out. They range from sculptor Don Gummer’s massive, suspended, multi-ton granite “Primary Separation,” to the compelling experiments with light created by James Turrell.
Through early September, in the museum’s one-acre Building #5, the artist Glenn Kaino has created a complex, kinetic exhibit “In the Light of a Shadow.” It’s an elegant choreography of a soundscape matched to extremely intricate plays of moving images recalling the chronicle of civil and social protest.
“A Memorial…,” “Weep Holes,” and “700,000:1…,” continue through Jan. 2023. Admission: Adults , $20; Stdts. w/i.d. $12; Ages 6 -16 $8. Open Weds. Thru Mon. Closed Tuesday. The museum encourages masking.