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...the green and brown birds feel responsible for lifting the sun. They work hard to make it happen. Some feel more responsibility for lifting heavy objects. Some responsible for the more subtle shades of lemon yellow in the air.

Jill Poet, PAULA HAYES in Lucid Green, at D. R. Evarts Library until October 14  

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It could be different on another day, but might also be the same.

a pale room a pale sea tumbled bright lit from out from in a thinly placid surface the sky and sea. But not. The rest coming through the sun the greening ground a violence just redly there suddenly. But not, was the flesh not already there? To feel the bright lit not placid sea and sky the flesh there redly suddenly. Is this necessary?

                      “plop”

put your finger pinkly just here but not necessary just what it is it is altogether.

Vanessa Baish on ANDREW DUPONT, Listen, in the Library until October 14.

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I detect no hint of what might be concealed behind the doors save pale printed script declaring: dawn, midday, dusk, and midnite. Dawn. I am hauled back to reality.

I devour with my eyes the work my kind is forbidden from seeing. It is too complex for our minds to comprehend, too important to be entrusted to us. We are reduced to this manner of consumption. The scriptorium smells of the linen they use for the paper. The moonlight comes through the gaunt windows and glints off the illuminations as the ink dries down. I wander the room and revel in the intellect and intricacy solidified on the pages by the brothers of this place. What I wouldn’t do to pass for one of them. To be surrounded by such elevating academia and beauty. Pinned to one monk’s desk is an especially halting work. The document is small and handsome, designed with structures like on a chart of the monastery, vaulted ceilings lined up almost evenly. The human effort behind the result is visible in the miniscule imperfections. Tentatively, I touch the page. I retract my hand in fear of smudging the fresh ink. Such a striking color, like egg yolks. Moving my candle around its perimeter I start discerning the sections on the page lifted and pressed in patterns. Dotting, like the lines brothers trace to keep their writing even. Small twisted shapes speak to me, resonating of an ancient language pagans might recognize. Laid into the center is another raised piece upon which four drawn structures reside. I realize with fascination that the work is a tetraptych, sealed from within. I detect no hint of what might be concealed behind the doors save pale printed script declaring: dawn, midday, dusk, and midnite. Dawn. I am hauled back to reality. Lauds has come to a close and the chanting has faded away. Should I be discovered here in the stark light of day my stolen robes and bound chest would not disguise me. I escape down the stone staircase and through the heavy oak door to the grounds, scraping it closed against a resistant earth floor. As I retreat into town I commit every line of the drawings to memory and decide with a smile to break into the monastery more often.

Beatrice McAviney for CARRIE FEDER, in the Library with Purgatory Pie Press. Show continues to October 14.

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JOY

Lake above Lake

Firm lines are  Centered, Yielding Without. This Flows With the Tao of Heaven; It resonates with people. The Folk are led by Joy; They forget toil. Hardship Is faced with Joy. Death forgotten. Great Strength of Joy Elevates The spirit of the Folk! Lake joins with Lake, Conjunctio lacuum. The True and their friends Converse; They practice together.

Joy is West, Autumn. The Myriad Things Rejoice. It is Sheep, Mouth. Youngest child. Marsh, Lake, Shamaness. Tongue. Destruction, Bursting open. Of soils, Hard and salty. It is concubine.

This I Ching toss result for HILARY BALDWIN. In the Library, the sun appears in Baldwin’s Untitled I and II (2017). For more please visit the artist’s website, and try Topographie Anecdotée du Hasard which includes this map of a FLUXUS artist’s travels, friends and artistic adventures. Come and visit Athens Library, show continues to October 14.

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Was somebody asking to see the Soul? See! your own shape and countenance―persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands. All hold spiritual joys, and afterwards loosen them: How can the real body ever die, and be buried?

Behold! the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern―and includes and is the Soul; Whoever you are! how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it. Whoever you are! to you endless announcements.

All this time, and at all times, wait the words of true poems; The words of true poems do not merely please, The true poets are not followers of beauty, but the august masters of beauty; The greatness of children is the exuding of the greatness of mothers and fathers, The words of poems are the tuft and final applause of science. Divine instinct, breadth of vision, the law of reason, health, rudeness of body, withdrawnness, Gayety, sun-tan, air-sweetness―such are some of the words of poems.

The words of true poems give you more than poems, They give you to form for yourself, poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, romances, and everything else, They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes, They do not seek beauty―they are sought, Forever touching them, or close upon them, follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick. They prepare for death―yet they are not the finish, but rather the outset, They bring none to his or her terminus, or to be content and full; Whom they take, they take into space, to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings, To launch off with absolute faith―to sweep through the ceaseless rings, and never be quiet again. For more check out Leaves of Grass, written and rewritten throughout the life of Walt Whitman (Grosset & Dunlap: New York, 1850-1881). In the Library, Glendale Garden offers a grounded, local view of the cosmos by AMY LINCOLN. Fire of the sky kissed by the sun; first flashes of twilight, the ambivalent curve of the earth studded with pebbles, seen through the sated transience of flowers eager for tomorrow. All the same could be the flourish of dawn, lingering sparkle of the moon’s moved embrace. 

Seasons and events all rest on the same plane here, magic with colors seen from the ground―captured screen grab from a child’s imagination. For all its strangeness and mystery there is a continuity to this dumb planet and if nothing else we might be consoled knowing it will outlive us. 

Impossible histories and invisible futures smoothed to their actual, reserved nothingness. Obsessively detailed so to show there can be no single account of the real: there is so much!, and yet just an indication of what is! A cautious invitation to see, telling that this singularity of perception needn’t presuppose the necessity, the enjoyment of looking together.

For more try Garden Dwellers, at Regina Rex art gallery until August 9, and please visit the artist’s website. For more from our exhibition please visit Athens Library… Athens Laundry continues through October, 2017. 

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To go into solitude, one needs to retire as much from the chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if one would be alone, let them look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between them and what they touch. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give them, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would we believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. 

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest extort its secret, and lose curiosity by finding out all its perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of their best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of childhood.

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. ... The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. 

Published anonymously in 1890 excerpts from Emerson’s Nature lectures appear in the Library in selections from the Reverse Punctuation Constellations, a collaborative response with writer Sam Anderson to site specific installation by MELISSA MCGILL. Part of Hudson Highlands State Park Constellation is currently booking its final season of guided twilight boat tours, with Bannerman Castle Trust’s Estuary Steward. Studio images above courtesy of the artist.

A rain dance. A void dance. No island research of any kind. No island of any kind. No island. No research. From now on I will only know what I know now. I know now: avoidance. managing intervals. not body. turtling. misdiagnosis. no island of any kind. west coast. east coast. “on top of things” ‘time is a caucasian thing’ “human among humans”

Sam Anderson and Melissa McGill, 2016

For more on McGill please visit the artist’s website. For more from our exhibition, please visit Athens Library and stay tuned — show continues through October, 2017. 

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As in the floating staircase currently on view at D. R. Evarts Library titled Neutra/ Duiker Ascent (for its architects), the exacting litho ink drawings of REBECCA CHAMBERLAIN result from an intense poetry of process. Seen here the artist's renderings of architectural photography may seem to capture a gravity of hindsight. In the image above from a recent visit to the artist's studio in Delhi, New York, Chamberlain's work meaningfully tilts perspectives of the master plan to insist on a view from the ground.

In the Library, Neutra/ Duiker Ascent 1925-1964, (2017) combines images of the VDL Research House and Zonnestraal, two important examples of the movement toward ‘light, air and openness’ in architecture. Using photographs taken on distinct site visits to the house and sanatorium aided by archival collections at California Polytechnic State University and those intimately connected to the Netherlands facility, Chamberlain writes:

...in general, the colors of the Zonnestraal have both influenced and justified my use of a very light titanium/cobalt gesso layer and the continuation of the reflex blue for painting the images. The walls of the sanatorium were a very light blue in order to create a seamless reflection of sun and sky in the space. 

This success in postwar hospital and factory construction continues to influence the design of homes today. 

In its inherited international blue Chamberlain’s work honors the intent toward health and leisure for all, while interrogating the reliance on mass manufacture. Ruptured by the rhetorics of biodesign on the one hand, and industrial methodology on the other, Chamberlain’s work is a compassionate exploration of the home as asylum and healer.

Selections from the above will be included in a solo exhibition focusing on Los Angeles architecture; how it is shaped by our need for views of the horizon, this September at Charlie James Gallery. For more on Chamberlain please visit the artist's website. For more on Neutra or Duiker check out Survival by Design (Oxford University Press: 1954) and the Zonnestraal Sanatorium, respectively. For more from our exhibition, please visit Athens Library and stay tuned — show continues through October, 2017.

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Andrew Dupont, Skilled Practitioner, 2010

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Jessica Langley, Untitled, 2016

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Fog Song

Mourning cock dove of the harbor,

Morning calls, now, which last night— Homer aside— sleep induced.

The clever one mast-tied, with stop-earred crew, listened alone, and was not fooled.

Alone, I listen too, loosed from dreams, I’m fooled, and lured awake.

—Wayne Sheridan

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Sadee Brathwaite, Inside and Out, 2017

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Amy Lincoln, Bismarck Palm, 2017

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Laura Battle, Alloy, 2013

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Rosy Keyser, Ice Fishing, 2013

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To build a new.  A creative puzzle made of mismatched mistakes.

A bricoleur.  Me an artist of untidy metamorphosis.

Teaching transformation, desperate to learn alchemy.

Puzzles to not solve, pieces lost, unfit pieces passed down.

—Dawn Breeze

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Hilary Baldwin, Peas, 2014