Shelley Spector: before the hill 

Opening Saturday, August 12 from 2-5pm

before the hill is a gathering of works by Shelley Spector, a multidisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia and Dingmans Ferry, PA. In this show, her first in six years, she presents a selection of sculptures and installations made between 2007 and 2016 exploring themes common in her work that include time, systems of measurement, the environment, and human connection. In the years since she made these works, Spector has been deeply engaged in the deconstruction and reconstruction of a cabin property in the Pennsylvania mountains, working it into a sculpture, a future studio, and a site for interdisciplinary, creative and environment-focused practice. The cabin, it’s outbuildings (a shed and outhouse) and surrounding property are The Nowadays—a developing sculptural ecosystem made from underutilized and discarded resources. The project is inspired by excess, need, and the effects of human impact on our natural world.

Included in before the hill are works made with fabric and wood acquired through the deconstruction of clothing, furniture, and other discarded and collected objects that employ sewing, woodwork, and home-making techniques. In varied forms such as wallpaper, embroideries, and a motorized sculpture, this presentation of work is a reflective launch point for new work to be made in the soon-to-be-completed cabin studio.

Spector’s work is part of many public and private collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which presented her solo exhibition Keep The Home Fires Burning, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. Spector has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Leeway Foundation. Spector joined Mildred’s Lane as a fellow in 2017 and has since remained involved, currently committed to the restoration, renewal, and repair of the property.

MORE ON SHELLEY SPECTOR

THE MILDRED COMPLEX(ITY) • 37B MAIN STREET, NARROWSBURG, NY 12764

SUMMER HOURS: SATURDAYS 11–5 • SUNDAYS 11–3 • OR BY APPOINTMENT (CONTACT MILDREDSLANE@GMAIL.COM OR CALL 413-652-1838

Alastair Gordon: Pattern Recognition #2

May 22–July 30, 2023

Alastair Gordon’s drawings are reflections on time, memory, patience, and what William Gibson called “pattern recognition”,  simple markings and scratchings layered over rudimentary grid substrates. Alastair is also an author and critic. His books are about art, utopia, the built environment, and what Gaston Bachelard called the poetics of space. His drawings are fields of observation and duration. He draws with powdered pigments bound with gum arabic and black ink made from fermented carbon and pine-tree resin. The process is slow and repetitive, in the trance-like spirit of Henri Michaux’s mescaline drawings from the 1950s and 1960s, works that began as written texts but turned into abstract émergences.

Join us for an evening with Alastair Gordon, who will be reading from his books Spaced Out, Weekend Utopia, and others to celebrate his current exhibition during the town-wide Deep Water Literary Festival.

June 16, 4–7 PM

Artist Talk at 5 PM

The Mildred Complex(ity)  • 37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY 12764 

Summer Hours  •  Saturdays 11–5  •  Sundays 11–3  •  or by appointment

Alastair Gordon is a writer and artist. He studied art at Princeton and Yale with Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Al Held, Joel Shapiro, Robert Ryman, Lynda Benglis, Barry Le Va, and Mel Bochner. He studied art history and critical theory with George Kubler, Andrew Forge, J.B. Jackson, Vincent Scully, and Robert Herbert. After receiving an MFA from Yale in 1978, he exhibited his drawings and installation works in both America and Europe. For more than twenty years, he wrote on art, architecture, and the environment for the New York Times and in 2008 became Contributing Editor on art & design for the Wall Street Journal. In addition to his critical journalism, Gordon has published more than 26 books, including such critically acclaimed titles as Weekend Utopia, Naked Airport, Spaced Out, Theater of Shopping, Arquitectonica, Romantic Modernist, Island Follies, and Wandering Forms. As Publisher’s Weekly wrote: “Gordon’s eye for the convergence of art, architecture and commerce is unerring.” In 2016, he launched “Poetics of Place,” a critical writing program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and has taught and lectured at many other institutions. Earlier in his career, Alastair served as the Robert Lehman Curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y. He has four children and lives in Milford, PA with his wife and publishing partner, Barbara de Vries.

More info here

Opening March 11, 2023

VIROSA Presents: Degenerate Cinema at The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space, Narrowsburg, NY

Degenerate adj. ||  1 having declined, as in function or nature, from a former or original state   2 morally corrupt or given to vice   3 [mathematics] being simpler than the typical use, i.e., a degenerate hyperbola   4 [physics & astronomy] characterized by atoms stripped of their electrons and by very great density, i.e., degenerate matter; a degenerate star

Degenerate v. ||  1 to pass from a higher to a lower type or condition   2 to sink into a low intellectual or moral state   3 to decline in quality   4 [biology] to evolve or develop into a less autonomous or functionally active form

VIROSA Presents: Degenerate Cinema is an exhibition of experimental film, prints, and sculpture by VIROSA. Two recent narrative short films will be on view, both with deep ties to Mildred’s Lane. Poor Magic, a surrealist short about a foolish magician in pursuit of his shadow, was filmed at Mildred’s Lane during the pandemic lockdown of 2020. Fishbowl, an experimental narrative about a man who breaks into a museum to clean fossils by night, was edited at Mildred’s Lane in the deep winter of 2022 after filming in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. In addition to the films, VIROSA will exhibit objects in materials including glass, paper, clay, and 3D-printed plastic which have emerged from their filmmaking practice.

The exhibition will be on view through April 2023.

JILL GOLDMAN
DISENTANGLEMENT/RE-EMBODIMENT

The Mildred Complex(ity)
37B Main Street / Narrowsburg / NY 12764

Opening reception / October 8 / 3 pm – 5 pm

Mildred's Lane and The Mildred Complex(ity) proudly present the installation Disentanglement/Re-embodiment by Los Angeles-based artist Jill Goldman.

In this new body of work—a response to two years of research into patriarchy—Goldman continues her ongoing exploration of transformative ritual and the gendered body. Developed at Mildred’s Lane during a residency in 2021, Disentanglement/Re-embodiment is an ambitious attempt to disentangle the bonds of gender-based oppression and imagine a re-embodied self, unencumbered by patriarchal power and domination. In videos, photographs and performances Goldman interrogates the intangible ways that patriarchy creates fictions of the body and then insists that these fictions are natural, essentializing socially constructed traits as biologically and divinely determined, thereby simultaneously constructing and compelling gendered realities.

While it's impossible to know if we can ever fully experience our bodies outside of the linguistic and patriarchal social institutions that not only regulate them but define them, Disentanglement/Re-embodiment challenges the viewer to take seriously the possibility of a self independent of a system based on power relations. In performances that use ropes and women's hair, music and dance, Goldman makes visible the invisible structures of patriarchy and attempts to untangle them, extricating female bodies from their insidious and subjugating webs. Goldman, a long-time activist who advocates for the rights of those marginalized by patriarchy is skilled at pragmatic resistance, fighting injustice from a position inside our political and social systems. In her art and Tantric meditation practice, however, she explores a more radical form of resistance, a resistance that is founded on an expansive consciousness that demolishes the oppressive structures the political right is so hellbent on solidifying.

The Sanskrit word Tantra derives from the verbal root tan, meaning to weave, and while Goldman attempts to unravel one fabric, she weaves another one, represented visually in videos and photographs printed on muslin in which the boundaries between the self and the world blur. From its origins in 6th century India, Tantric initiation has always been open to all genders and all social classes. With its revolutionary shapeshifting goddesses and panpsychism Tantra dissolves borders and erases binaries. By embracing this profoundly non-dualist consciousness, Goldman imagines a dematerialized liquid reality, an alchemical transformation that occurs in the world, via the body, revealing the sacred in the profane. Because this state of "oneness" entails a radical solidarity with every human, indeed, with every particle in the universe, the boundaries that separate the terrestrial from the numinous, the self from other, subject from object, collapse, and all hierarchies are razed. Patriarchy is rendered not only absurd but cosmically powerless.

-Asti Hustvedt

Jeffrey Jenkins Photography / Performers include Veronica Caudillo / Louise Hamagami / and Roxanne Steinberg / with music by Livia Reiner and Rose Reiner.

The Mildred Complex(ity)

FLEA MARKET PROJECT
Everything Could Go

Opening Saturday / July 23, 2022 / 12 – 5
37 b Main Street / Narrowsburg, NY 12764

MARK DION / AMY YOES
with
MARY JANE JACOB / MERETE RØSTAD

in collaboration with the Abakanowicz Fellows:

Inés Arango / Elisa Benzo / Sophie Buchmueller / Johnny Doley / Miguel Espinoza / Ella Fainaru-Wada / Kelly Johnston / Jad El Khoury / Alice Matthews / Meghan McCray / Scott O'Brien / Vanessa Payne / Kirsten Schuck / Sarah Sekles / Katherine Skwira-Brown

A transient site for gathering and commerce, flea markets attract a range of publics: discerning collectors, professional pickers, resourceful vendors, and casual browsers. This summer, a cohort of Magdalena Abakanowicz Fellows attended the Circle Drive-in Flea Fair in Scranton, PA to delve into the mechanisms of the flea market and engage in alternative modes of production and exchange. 

Drawing from the ethos of Mildred's Lane, this project builds off the social ecology of the flea market while collapsing boundaries between art and life. The interdisciplinary project plays with the layered dynamics between objects, place, time, and interpersonal connections. 

The exhibition Everything Could Go, opening at The Mildred Complex(ity) Saturday, July 23, is one of a few iterations of this investigation. The show features artworks made from reimagined flea market finds, documentation of the group's booths at the Flea Fair, and records of conversations and interactions that unfolded.

The Flea Market Project and Exhibition are made possible by The Madalena Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Trust and The Department of Arts and Crafts in the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO). Thank you all.

........................................................

MARK DION is an American conceptual artist best known for using scientific methodologies in his installations. His work examines how prevalent ideologies and institutions influence our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The job of the artist, according to him, is to "go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention." ( Art 21). Dion is the co-director of Mildred's Lane, Pennsylvania.

AMY YOES works in a multi-faceted way, alternately employing installation, photography, video, painting, and sculpture. An interest in decorative language and architectural space permeates all of her work. She responds to formal topologies of ornament and style that have reverberated through time, informing our mutually constructed visual and cultural memory. Visit Hot Corners, a site-specific installation at MASS MoCA in North Adams MA. It is a multi-room, immersive environment with thematic forms and functions. 

MARY JANE JACOB is a curator and writer who championed public, site-specific, and socially engaged art as a shared practice and discourse. She is Professor and Director of the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2018 she published Dewey for Artists with the University of Chicago Press. She is curating the Magdalena Abakanowicz exhibition at the Tate Modern opening this November.

MERETE RØSTAD is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and artist-researcher whose projects are rooted in examining collective memory, representation, and archives in the public sphere. Røstad is an Associate Professor in Art and Public Space (MFA) and head of research at the Department of Arts and Craft at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO).

THE MILDRED COMPLEX(ity) project space is the public face of Mildred's Lane. Located on Narrowsburg's Main Street, working-living-making-researching exhibitions, programs, and events by artists questioning our impact as cultural producers in every aspect of life in the 21st century. 

YEAR of SILVER / Exhibition
The Mildred Complex(ity) presents 
Susanna Crum and Rudy Salgado
 On the Map
May 28 through July 4 / Reception / Saturday  / May 28th / 1 pm through 5 pm
 

How and when does a town begin? In the US, the naming and establishment of a post office have inscribed the intention and identity of a town on maps and within communities. From the 1860s to the 1930s, itinerant tintype photographers traveled the country with mobile portrait studios. They summoned ghosts in the atmospheric backgrounds of their images or documented soldiers and the deceased for inclusion in the newly-popular family photo album. Tintypes were the first affordable means for Americans to share images with distant family and friends, as the photographs on metal could be reliably placed in the mail. Rudy Salgado and Susanna Crum traveled with a mobile darkroom around the state of Kentucky, investigating historical post office sites with this 170-year-old method. In their hours spent producing hand-poured plates on site, they met property owners and history keepers who shared stories of the post office as a crucial community-powered site for information and social exchange. On the Map includes photographs, drawings, and postcards from this research-led journey
                                                                                                                      _ The Artists / May 2022

Susanna Crum and Rudy Salgado live in Louisville, Kentucky, where they operate Calliope Arts, a shared workspace for artists working in print media. They received MFA degrees from the University of Iowa in 2012 and moved to Louisville to work as artists, collaborators, and educators. Together, they care for property and a house built in 1885 in downtown Louisville, including their residence, printmaking, wet plate collodion photography studios, a large kitchen garden, and a chicken coop. They have exhibited solo and collaborative projects across the US and abroad, and have received numerous grants and awards. They have recently attended artist residencies at Kunstarhuset Messen, Ålvik, Norway; Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, Scotland; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; and Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA. Susanna and Rodolfo have made many ongoing contributions to Mildred's Lane Projects, including Mildred Archaeology. 
Insta/ @susannacrum and @rivercitytintype
Image / Bryants Store, 2021 /Wet plate collodion tintype, 8x10

Year of Silver marks our 25th anniversary – hence Mildred's Lane is closed to refresh the site, the artist projects, and upgrade our organization. We are fundraising to expand our impact as a cultural site for the future throughout the year. To support these efforts in fundraising, in the landscape, supported internships, and general assistance, please send letters of interest with your skills and available working dates to mildredslane@gmail.com 

Read the article /
ARTFORUM / April / ON SITE
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
Ian Bourland on Mildred’s Lane

Please DONATE / Support Mildred's Lane

SILVER–IRON–LIGHT
Opening / November 6, 2021 / 3-6pm
37B Main Street. Narrowsburg, NY

Noah Doely, Shoshana Fink, Rich Garr, Leila Gordon, Nancy Grace Horton, Elizabeth Kelly, Leah Koransky, Joe Lerro, Rachael Schmoker, Samiha Tasnim,

The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space is pleased to present alchemical works created by fellows during the Summer 2021 session, SILVER–IRON–LIGHT. The exhibition features handmade 19th-century photographic processes including tintype, cyanotype, and anthotype, as well as other works revealing the landscape of Mildred's Lane. 

Please visit the storefront project space located at 37B Main Street. Narrowsburg, NY 12764. We will be open on Saturdays from 12 to 5 pm and Sundays from 12 to 4 pm throughout the exhibition's run; or, contact mildreslane@gmail.com to visit by appointment.