Last month, the first of two companion exhibitions from artist Marc Swanson premiered at Mass MoCA in North Adams. The second exhibition will open on July 16th at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York.
Entitled “Marc Swanson: A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco,” the exhibition has drawn inspiration from the works of Thomas Cole, the founder of the mid-19th century American art movement known as the Hudson River School.
Zydalis Bauer spoke with Swanson to learn how his work examines the relationships between humans, culture and the natural world.
Read the full transcript:
Tony Dunne, Connecting Point: Last month, the first of two companion exhibitions from artist Marc Swanson premiered at Mass MoCA in North Adams, with the second exhibition opening on July 16 at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York.
Entitled “Marc Swanson: A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco,” this exhibition has drawn inspiration from the works of Thomas Cole, the founder of the mid-19th century American art movement known as the Hudson River School.
Zydalis Bauer spoke with Swanson to learn how his work examines the relationships between humans, culture, and the natural world.
Marc Swanson, Artist: Thomas Cole is considered the father of the Hudson River School — painting school — and that sort of, default, considered the first American art movement.
So, I was feeling a little stuck with my work, so I just sort of followed this thread of Thomas Cole thinking, I mean, I’m a contemporary sculptor. It doesn’t have a lot to do with landscape painting, but I thought I would follow that thread.
And I came to find out that Thomas Cole was a, like, what we would probably call now proto environmentalist. And his work, paintings, were very in line with the Transcendentalists and the spirituality of nature. And that’s very much where I’m in, you know? Where I like to sort of bring in nature and culture together.
And so, I just followed that thread and it took me different place — you know, it took me to different places, but the work does inspire me — and Thomas Cole was self-taught. There’s a lot of really interesting things for me, in pulling these threads out with Thomas Cole, spending time in the Catskills, and where — where he painted, how he painted is really kind of it can relate in quite a bit of different ways.
Zydalis Bauer, Connecting Point: Now, let’s talk about the title of these exhibitions a little bit. “A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco.”
Can you break that down for us and tell us the meaning and significance behind it?
Marc Swanson: I was nervous about using that title and through the following the thread of Thomas Cole, I did a residency at Platt Clove in the Catskills here, through the Catskill Center. That was a small cabin, and you can stay for a week. And I was hiking like every day and in the woods and there’s no running water. There’s — there’s an outhouse, there’s no — heats with wood, so you’re very close to the land there.
And about a week into that — I was thinking the whole time how this was very how Thomas Cole would have lived and maybe the kind of place he would have stayed in in the 1800s — I had this moment where I realized, wow, you know, I just feel so connected. I feel at one with the universe here. But then I was sort of pulled out, pulled out of it by the specter of climate change.
And we use ice so much, I think it’s kind of the canary in the coal mine, kind of version, you know? It’s like how much the polar ice caps melting, how much of the glacier is melting, how much is sea level going to rise? How much that? So, I sort of have this one, kind of a guilty feeling like I’m part of this, will this beautiful scene where I’m connecting with the universe just will last, you know? But also this idea of sort of being thrust into the future of what would it be like to sort of set up a memorial to something like ice, which is just a shorthand, I think, for how we look at climate change.
Then when I came back and I was working on pieces to do with that and then coming up with concepts for the show, I realized I kept having this déja vu moment of this kind of thing, of like, feeling really connected, feeling really home, and then being pulled out of it into the dangers of the future.
And I realized it was so similar to when I was first coming of age and went to nightclubs when I was younger. And it was a very same feeling where I was very connected, I felt whole. I had moved from New Hampshire to the city and I felt like this was my place. But then, you know, when I was feeling so connected, I would be pulled out of it by the specter and the fear of the AIDS crisis, because very much like climate change now you couldn’t see it and you and it was sort of like very amorphous how it was actually even happening, but it was happening.
So, I for a long time sort of had this idea that the title would be either “A Memorial to Ice” or “The Dead Deer Disco,” which had to do with those two things. And I was very uncomfortable with trying to, like, conflate these two huge things: one from the — more in the past and about a whole different thing, but realizing that they were sort of treated in very much the same way and thought, well, if I just put maybe I can put the title together and trying to put these things together, it could link the whole thing.
Zydalis Bauer: Now, I know that the exhibitions are a series of sculptures and environments.
Tell me about the materials that you use and how we will kind of go through that…those levels of connections of culture, nature, and just human.
Marc Swanson: For materials in the show, at first it was it was kind of like, how do I make a show about climate change and not affect, you know, how do I do it without carbon? And I came up with the idea. I was like, “Well, the only thing I could really do is show a completely dark gallery space.”
And because artwork in itself, if you think about it, is not meant to degrade. Like a couch, no matter how much money you spend on it, if you use it one, it will go out of style, and two, it will — it will degrade.
Art — we look at artwork from hundreds, thousands of years old. Looking at it doesn’t degrade it. So, I wasn’t so worried about the materials I was using being necessarily sustainable, because it was kind of a choice like do I do a dark gallery, or do I make a choice and show say what I want to say? Because it was so interesting looking at these things that could work as bases for sculptures and things that, when people buy these beautiful pieces of furniture, they never think they’re going to get rid of them. It seems like something that will last forever, but it always does end up either in a restore or a landfill, more likely.
So, kind of naturally using found objects and bringing this into my sculpture, ended up sort of commenting on this part of how culture works, that using these kind of out of style, out of date objects that were sitting in these stores for almost nothing, I think it invites the viewer to think about what is there.
Zydalis Bauer: These exhibitions also create a narrative that tie the past — Thomas Cole’s past — to the present, also talking about conservation and memorial.
So, what do you hope people take away and feel after viewing your work?
Marc Swanson: I think I tried to create an emotional space where people could enter these subjects on a very personal level, because I think these, as one of my favorite thinkers in all this, Tim Morton calls hyper objects. They’re so big, we can’t even learn, like, figure out how to think about them.
You know, I think a lot of times for me, like seeing a movie or a TV show or reading a book about a very difficult subject really gives me the distance to be able to process it through somebody else’s experience. So, I wanted to try and do that in this show and create a space where people could wander through it and have their own feelings through, hopefully, sort of me being really honest in a certain way, but through art, through a visual medium, you know, which I think can be more open in that way.
