In Germantown, N.Y., Anne Imhof’s industrial water tanks function each stage and infrastructure, framing a complete exhibition. These containers create a labyrinthine journey—an intricate maze of hallways and enclosures the place paintings is framed, encapsulated and reshapes the open ground of a former apple warehouse left untouched. Human efforts to comprise and applicable water—symbols of purification but additionally opacity—open new pathways of which means and dialogue. On the identical time, they generate pressure that’s unresolved, disorienting and at occasions claustrophobic, reworking the house right into a sculptural vessel of management and concealment. In resisting the age of overstimulation, these containers carve out a uncommon atmosphere for the sluggish unfolding of artwork.
Sky Excessive Farm isn’t a typical cultural venue however a mission-driven group grounded in community-centered analysis and motion on the intersection of local weather, agriculture, meals entry and schooling. Based in 2011 by artist Dan Colen, the farm was created to confront meals insecurity whereas increasing entry to contemporary, nutritious meals for underserved communities.
Because the group’s most bold initiative thus far, Sky Excessive Farm’s biennial—unveiled in June and working by November—is a robust mix of artwork, land, farming and activism. It explores the fertile connections between native ecology, historic legacy and regional trade. “We needed to share the concepts that undergird our work on the farm group —self-determination, a related and interdependent relationship with nature, an consciousness of historic inequity, erasure and marginalization all through industrialization—with a bigger public,” Sarah Workneh, co-executive director of Sky Excessive Farm, instructed Observer. “Artwork and artists have the distinctive potential to convey and make private the complexity of all of those concepts, and a present of this scale can attain a range of people and communities with the intention to convey them nearer to our work.”
From the beginning, Sky Excessive Farm has embraced broad-based, interdisciplinary collaboration as a option to reimagine options for entrenched structural issues. “The group repeatedly companions with social service companies, group organizations, biologists, ecologists and farmers, educators, but additionally with artists to collectively think about and contribute to a more healthy, extra plentiful, extra related shared future,” Workneh stated.
That the farm isn’t a traditional artwork venue makes the checklist of the brand new biennial’s collaborating artists all of the extra putting, with hard-to-access names like Anne Imhof, Rudolf Stingel, Tschabalala Self, Rirkrit Tiravanija and the Félix González-Torres Basis. The important thing lies in how the idea and works align seamlessly with Sky Excessive Farm’s mission, which for Colen has develop into its personal murals—an inventive, ecological and social platform geared toward actual impression.
“The exhibition, and the entire artists, gallerists, artwork advisors, installers, shippers, framers and fabricators, has helped us talk our work to new audiences—doing what artwork does so properly—inviting every customer to search out their very own and myriad methods of connecting to the urgency of our work, demonstrates that there are methods to take part within the face of so many seemingly insurmountable issues,” added Workneh.
In her 2023 present at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, Imhof used the identical industrial water tanks to create a tense, red-lit, bunker-like atmosphere for her work, movies and sound works. At Sky Excessive Farm, these containers as an alternative divulge heart’s contents to interventions by different artists, producing a system of relationships, connections and dialogues that embody, each sensorially and spatially, the interconnectedness and entanglements explored by the biennial, titled “TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END.”
The artworks within the present don’t merely occupy the house, but additionally feed into it, shaping and activating not solely meanings and messages but additionally actions and reactions that stretch past the exhibition itself. Imhof’s tanks, for instance, will later be repurposed as compost bioreactors for native farms. Upstairs, a fountain set up by Mexican artist Pia Camil, constructed from grafted lifeless apple bushes, rests atop Rudolf Stingel’s twelve-square-foot mirrored ground—a maze that unsettles house, perspective and narrative as viewers navigate the second ground’s multimedia choreography. Among the many works, Transportable Orchards by Environmental Artwork pioneers Harrison Studio emerges as a dwelling sculpture—atypical, pure presences that evolve in actual time, adapting precariously to the tough situations of this windowless warehouse. In the meantime, recycled water flows from Camil’s fountain as a promise of renewal, trickling down the trunks, by the ground and into Imhof’s tanks.
Every paintings, even when constructed from industrial parts, reveals itself as dwelling matter in flux, forcing us to contemplate not solely its lifecycle but additionally our duty for sustaining the delicate stability of any ecosystem. Throughout two flooring, the exhibition phases a complete community of relationships and interdependencies, proposing new methods of partaking with artwork—recasting artworks as vessels, instruments and individuals in a extra sustainable cycle of manufacturing and consumption.
What first seems as randomness turns into a randomatic system of co-dependence, unfolding between works as nature and the Anthropocene entwine, interexchange and collide in a consequential convergence of natural and industrial supplies. The strain is palpable, but there are glimmers of recent harmonies and evolving resolutions. Some works heighten this pressure dramatically, equivalent to Stephen Lichty’s 2014 grey basalt monolith topped with a taxidermied cat, first introduced in his debut at Cunning Manufacturing—a monument to the implications of humanity’s interference with nature.
One feels immersed in a series response of pure and anthropic parts, balanced on the sting of collapse or convergence. Very like Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s The Approach Issues Go (1987), this fastidiously orchestrated choreography reveals overlapping programs of trigger and motion—between human gestures and creations, between the constructed world and nature. It invitations reflection on the transient qualities of all interventions and the relativity of human-made which means and notion when set towards a broader cosmic order.
Suspended the wrong way up, a tree slowly revolves on its axis, guided—or compelled—by a machine, its branches scraping the partitions of a human-controlled inside. Fallen leaves scatter and accumulate in concentric circles throughout the ground, marking time with seen traces of decay and cyclical passage. Michael Sailstorfer’s FORST (2021) renders the sluggish erosion of nature beneath human intervention visceral, exposing the stress between machine-driven processes and pure cycles and the irreversibility of anthropic disruptions to ecological stability.
Against this, Pia Camil’s Nature isn’t a Machine may be learn as an effort to reassert that order—unveiling nature’s resilience and underscoring the necessity for multispecies change, for rethinking the nonhuman world as collaborator slightly than useful resource. On this sense, the exhibition gestures towards a non secular and solidaristic flip, embracing an earthly actuality wherein nature and tradition are alive, intertwined and mutually sustaining but profoundly weak.
On the identical time, the biennial celebrates virtuous tales of initiatives rooted in rehabilitation and social betterment. Coming into the exhibition by the “Annex,” guests encounter a resonant refrain of twenty-five African artifacts from the gathering of Hudson Valley artist Ben Wigfall, curated by Lauren Halsey.
Working with Wigfall’s property, the exhibition highlights his extraordinary achievement in founding Communication Village, a print store and group heart in Kingston, N.Y. His mission was to “discover codecs which orchestrate conventional artwork and survival actions into one whole expression,” notably for Black American communities.
Collectively along with his companion, Mary Wigfall, he additionally developed the Agri-Enterprise Youngster Improvement venture, a holistic college and useful resource hub for migrant youngsters. Throughout the house, Wigfall’s audioworks amplify tales that confront the generational trauma of slavery and its lasting impression on Black People, notably within the area. Mary Wigfall’s embroideries, textile narratives and recordings seem alongside Wigfall’s prints, weaving a layered and multifaceted story.
One other key artist within the present, Utē Petit, presents a big assemblage rooted in her dedication to land conservation, bridging cultural heritage with ecological sustainability. A former Sky Excessive Grant recipient, the New Orleans-based artist narrates Black-Indigenous land traditions throughout visible and embodied mediums, merging art-making with environmental stewardship. Central to her apply is the conservation of ancestral land—she oversees her great-grandmother’s and three neighbors’ tons in New Orleans, looking for to rematriate household property as soon as taken by the state of Louisiana. By way of her work, Petit revives and preserves Black-Indigenous land-based traditions, fostering ecological resilience and cultural continuity.
Within the exhibition, all the things unfolds as a part of an countless circle of causality and contingency. Change, move, transformation and motion emerge as extra basic than kind or objecthood. As its title suggests, “TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END” serves as an immersive essay on the inevitability of interdependent entanglement—natural life and human-made programs intertwined in ways in which underpin every day survival.
Extending into the social and pure panorama past the farm, Félix González-Torres’ billboard work Untitled (It’s Only a Matter of Time) seems throughout twenty-four websites alongside the tidal Hudson River, from Troy to New York Harbor. Its ambiguity reads as each provocation and warning—a haunting reminder of self-destruction that resonates sharply amid right now’s political and ecological instability.
Mixing artwork, land, farming and activism right into a single operational mannequin, the biennial probes various relationships between tradition, native ecology, historic legacy and regional trade—reimagining how artwork can’t solely state, doc or declare but additionally instantly generate group profit.
Most collaborating artists have pledged a portion of sale proceeds to the group, establishing a working mannequin wherein cultural manufacturing fuels justice-driven outcomes. In doing so, the exhibition turns into a dynamic infrastructure, activating a community of relationships that share assets and create new channels of worth. All of this helps the nonprofit mission of combating meals insecurity and increasing entry to contemporary, nutritious meals for underserved communities.
By way of these experiments in worth creation, the exhibition opens new types of shared economies and fundraising. Such fashions remodel inventive worth into financial and social capital and right into a catalyst for motion, driving sustainability and producing measurable impression. Within the course of, the presumed separation between artwork, farming and mutual assist is quietly upended.
Whereas Colen’s background within the downtown New York artwork scene brings a definite cultural edge and curatorial weight to the venture, the biennial additionally marks a significant milestone for Sky Excessive Farm. It coincides with the group’s growth to a brand new 560-acre web site and highlights its evolution from a grassroots initiative right into a catalytic cultural drive within the area.
“The issues we work to deal with—meals insecurity, unequal useful resource distribution, local weather change—would require broad-based participation to unravel,” Sky Excessive Farm co-executive administrators Workneh and Josh Bardfield stated. As Colen’s imaginative and prescient takes form, artists reclaim their company, contributing work that raises ecological consciousness whereas actively looking for to revive stability between and past people, with the understanding that survival relies upon solely on collective effort and shared resolve.
“TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END” is on view at Sky Excessive Farm, 201 Predominant Avenue, Germantown, N.Y., by Fall of 2025.
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