Down By The Old Mill Trail, An Art And Sound Installation Awaits
Last year, when most of the galleries and museums closed, artist Stacey Silke Schultze decided, enough with the screens, there had to be a way to see art in person. People need, she insisted, to engage with art directly. So she, along with a small team, made it happen with Art Close to Home. It would, the team decided, be a collaborative art experience mobilized by visual artists, filmmakers, documentarians and curators who would create works to be exhibited in public outdoor spaces. The “venues” could be hiking trails, historic sites, conversation areas, and other outdoor spaces. The first, in July last year, placed artwork at Sheep Hill in Williamstown, Mass. The second, in the fall, displayed artwork along a group of trails outside Tourists riverside retreat in North Adams.
Now, Art Close to Home, whose tagline is “Experience Art in Nature,” opens its second season with a visual art and soundscape exhibition entitled “nowhere to go but everywhere,” placed within the Old Mill Trail. (The trailhead is located at the border of Dalton and Hinsdale, Mass.) The free exhibit is as fleeting as nature —it runs only from June 5-19 — but the impressions it leaves you with may stay considerably longer.
Multimedia artist Simone Couto’s contemporary art installation will include a series of eight-inch round “trail markers” featuring photographs of tree canopies. They will be displayed on trees along the trail and accompanied by an original soundscape designed by Daniela Stubbs-Levi, a Peruvian artist, poet and musician.
In a written statement, Couto invites viewers to walk the trail imagining that different seasons exist at the same time and question, “what happens in the body and mind when perception is shifted through visual displacement and sound.” It’s about learning to look, focusing on the meditative practice of walking and absorbing what you’re seeing.
Stacey Silkey Schultze, show curator and ACTH executive/creative director of Art Close to Home
Because of the multimedia aspect of the exhibit, there’s technology involved. But Schultze and the four others who make up the organization have carefully thought that out. There will be a bar code suspended below the circles, which leads to the audio that accompanies that particular image. And because cell service could be spotty on the trail, they’ve created an app, shared on social media and on a sign at the trailhead, that visitors can download, eliminating the need to depend on internet access.
Art Close to Home, whose fiscal sponsor is Fractured Atlas, has received funds through the Massachusetts Cultural Council and local cultural councils, and is partnering on this project with the Berkshire Museum and the Berkshire Natural Resources Council, which acquired the land the Old Mill Trail traverses in 2016. Much of the Old Mill Trail follows the upper reaches of the Housatonic River, and although it encompasses 127 acres, the installation covers less than a mile in one direction, then doubles back.
“We decided to only use the trail that’s accessible so everyone can get on it,” Schultze says. And don’t be alarmed: no trees were harmed in the installation — the wire used to attach the circles to the trees has been wrapped with rubber. “We were really conscious about our footprint in nature, and about respecting and maintaining properties.”
The exhibit opens with a virtual preview and an online panel discussion on June 4 at 7 p.m. with Jeff Rogers, executive director at the Berkshire Museum; Jenny Hansell, president of Berkshire Natural Resource Council, Stacey Silkey Schultze, show curator and ACTH executive/creative director; and artists Simone Couto and Daniela Stubbs-Levi. The actual launch will be recorded on location, complete with live commentary.
For more information, and to download the installation’s app, check the website.
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