End of the Season
November 1-28, 2021, S&S Corner Shop, East Hampton, NY
Artist List: Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Jason Evans, Adriana Farmiga, Mónica Félix, Suzanne Kite, Alison Knowles, Jason Nocito, Rune Olsen, Julie Pochron, Mariah Robertson, Rosalind Schneider, Tamar Siegfried Rosa Halpern, Johannes VanDerBeek, Yelena Yemchuk
End of The Season is the second installation by Soft Network with S&S Corner Shop. Work by fourteen artists includes paintings, photography, prints, sculpture and mixed-media collage. The exhibition is titled after a 2020 film by Jason Evans depicting mushroom pickers in Oregon looking for the fall’s last matsutakes. Evans’ contribution to the show is a photograph from this project which shows an anthropomorphic pile of mushrooms revealed by a central aperture, the object a recollection of experience and form inspired by the temporary housing constructed by the foragers.
Other artworks in the exhibition such as large-scale paintings with tangled depths of pigment and image by Tamar Siegfried Rosa Halpern, an erotic drawing of a river by Rosalind Schneider, a collage of a female figure romantically entangled with a bird by Yelena Yemchuk, a photograph hung outside the gallery by Mónica Félix of women wading in water that she captured from the first moving picture with sound made in Puerto Rico, and a vibrant splash of verdant photographic chemistry collected in a unique color print by Mariah Robertson also evoke the temporal layers of change in seasonal transitions through their references to movement.
Adriana Farmiga’s intimate geographical “state” paintings and watercolors depict tender arrangements of objects collected from her travel, study and studio. Suzanne Kite’s holographic ink screen-print of her weaving of the night sky uses a mechanical process to reiterate her original hand rendering as a manifestation of memory. Rune Olsen’s delicate works combine quotidian objects such as a cutting board with fantastical adornments, presenting a tangible memory of place arising from an unexpected surface. A print by Alison Knowles functions similarly. She describes the piece as, “The image in the edition Being With Paper (1/21/21) is an enlargement of the underside of a paper work made from my shoe in the mid 1990’s. At that time I was using linen paper pulp with lentils to make a 3D object from my own shoes. Today, this work is my evidence of being with paper.”
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili’s Polaroids of peonies made during quarantine and Johannes VanDerBeek’s uplifting painted steel and plaster sculpture offer very different tributes to the tradition of memento mori. Jason Nocito’s image of the last puddle he photographed before leaving Los Angeles to return to his home in New York City transposes a fleeting microcosm of wet, abstract depth into one of his carefully crafted pictures of dirty puddles he’s been making since 2011. In a similar play with scale, the clouds in Julie Pochron’s Polaroids of the Mexico coastline are at once expansive as the sky yet able to be held close.
End of the Season is a tribute to the push of a cooler fall wind, the early setting of the sun and a softening of light that reveals soaked and saturated purples, greys, greens, yellows and blues of a nature that is collectively imagined – fleeting, volatile and loved. As birds migrate and stones settle in for the season in the dampness in which fungi thrive, do we look to the earth or each other for comfort? If our attention shifts along the ground, water and sky, might we be better prepared to stay in place, reflect and respond, and make space for the flowers to return again?
