Over the weekend, Aleksandra Scepanovic took her artistic fancy across the Rondout Creek.
The mastermind behind the two-day pop-up art show “Of Needle and Nerve,” which bloomed and disappeared over 48 hours in a vacated tattoo parlor in Kingston, had set her sights on the marina property of Jeff’s Yacht Haven in Connelly as the next art gallery setting.
Of Hull and Hush, which she co-curated with Jennifer Miller, opened for just 48 hours to present the works of 41 artists in a vast one-room building which, judging by the wooden trusswork high up near the rafters, must have had something to do with the business of boatbuilding.
The walls of the building were not white. And the ambient light was not bright. In fact, the gloom was a relief from typically austere gallery showrooms.
But the artwork was clearly lit.
“Very, very precise and calculated,” Scepanovic said. “We spent two days just doing light.”
Which was important. Everywhere were objects that were not art, or very well could have been art, or were art that hardly looked like art. Without the precise lighting, the easy relationship between art and objects could have blended together and merged into a single category of confusion. But that seems to be the point.
Take the subcompact tractor, on the hood of which accent lighting was aimed.
“We’re just trying to say, what is the difference between a used tractor and a pedestal?” Scepanovic said. “That’s what we’re saying. We’re not saying this is art, but we are saying, is that a pedestal? Because we use them as pedestals for art.”
So the additional objects in the building are not art?
“Right. They’re there as the envelope that supports the art that lives in it. The whole building is the envelope, including all the found objects. The envelope told us what it wanted to be. And it said, okay, this is what we need. These are the opportunities. These are the spaces. So Jen and I came day after day, night after night, and took photos and stood here and just listened.”
What most often frustrates an uninitiated art-goer confronted by a conceptual idea of art—say, the delightful moving sculpture involving two shoes tied to the ends of ropes and an oar—as opposed to a framed painting which communicates where the art ends: the shoes are resting on a pile of car tires, which may or may not be a part of the sculpture. Just where does art stop and objects lying around begin? Thus the criticism applies to the curators as well. Is modern art art at all, or is it theater props—and are they imposters?
“We are. We might be,” Scepanovic says. “Do we care? Not necessarily. Do we have to put modern art or any art into just a specific context?”
Only if you want to sell it.
“I have to curate this conversation,” Scepanovic says. “Can you see the art versus the anvil?”
There’s an oil barrel overturned and standing on end in the center of the floor near a painting. It supports no object. Provides no light. Seems to serve no purpose.
It could be art.
“That’s there so you don’t trip over the floor,” Scepanovic says.
About the Art
A painting by Faith Bugman features a large, bald man reclining as if in a jacuzzi, but in a seashell of the type preferred by coconut crabs.
“It’s Buddha,” Scepanovic says. “It’s titled 1.618. It’s all about the golden ratio.”
The Fibonacci sequence, in profile.
Sophi Kravitz’s silver sculpture lies like a close-eyed sphinx, haunches up, with her fingertips sensing the earth beneath her.
“I think her name is Harelyn. She actually controls all the seismic activity on the planet, and these snakes report the seismic activity to her teats.”
In the center of the room, a table has been prepared with tablecloth and candelabra. Taxidermied pigeons look on.
“Well, we set a dinner table for the pigeons because we have birds in here, and that’s where the birds poop the most in the whole space. So rather than working against it, we said, you poop here? Fine. We’ll set a dinner table for you.”
When the weekend closes, Scepanovic suggests that the pigeon guano might be preserved with resin, cut up and then featured in the next show—location top secret.
Writhing with cuts, there are two panels of metal, scored and burnt by Marieken Cochius.
“This is a drawing with a blowtorch on roof metal. She has a very cool accent. She’s from the Netherlands originally.”
The improbable names of the artists run together like a blender full of diamonds:
Mimi Graminski. Riva Katvan. Yoko Izu. Paola Bari. Jiki Schnee.
An enormous unframed canvas hangs in the air. There are rips and cuts which have been sewed up.
“Jiki Schnee decided that the one thing that divides us all is the color of the skin,” Scepanovic says. “That’s the title of it—Skin. It was created during COVID. And so, then there’s bloodlines and cuts that divide us all. And yet, when you put them all together, you end up with this beautiful composition of color. She put them all together. You can actually, during the day, see the light come through those cuts. That’s what this piece is all about.”
She suggests that it should hang in the U.N. Headquarters.
Scepanovic and Miller met about 10 years ago.
“And we basically didn’t even realize that we worked this well together,” Miller says.
“We discovered it at our last show,” Scepanovic remarks. “Jen was involved in every step of putting that one together.”
“I feel like curation is art as well,” says Miller, formerly a graphic designer. “Curating a room reminds me of page layout. It’s all the tweaks and the decisions and the composition and the scale and the balance.”
They lead the interview into the “curator’s kitchen,” a room on the side where Miller has a painting hanging and Scepanovic has a sort of mobile sculpture hanging and then assembled found objects and clay in a refrigerator alongside some bread she’s molding. The brand of the bread has no significance, says Scepanovic.
Scepanovic leads us through the room to remark on various works of art.
“This is by Mau Schoettle,” Scepanovic says. “She does have a wonderful personality. We met her in person when she dropped off her piece. She went to open her bag, and I said, do you have bacon in your bag? And she said, we have so many tomatoes, and if we don’t eat BLTs every day, I just don’t know what we’ll do. And meanwhile, she’s a vegetarian. She was doing it for her husband. She’s carrying the bacon around.”
Among the mediums they could choose from—collage, painting, sculpture, site-specific installation—the first piece the curators placed in space was Sophi Kravitz’s seismologist creature.
Round mirrors have been set into the wall like portholes, ringed with neon blue rope lights. The effect is as if holes to another dimension have been left open.
“So, we were like, how do you actually make that piece seem like it’s about to leave the building and go somewhere else? So that was the point.”
Planning for the next ephemeral pop-up, postmodern deconstructionist art gallery—with its improvisational use of space and rejection of traditional gallery aesthetics—is already underway, to be announced at a currently undisclosed location.
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