In Baldwin’s recurring dream, the tree is there, then it isn’t. When working on their shaped canvas, the image of the tree kept returning. The painting’s relief frame was carved from a recently felled, local pine that Baldwin burned with a torch, creating a char mixture that was worked into its surface—a Japanese wood finishing technique that makes the wood water and fire resistant. Baldwin’s act is a smoke offering at the end of their process, honoring the billions of trees lost to wildfires and deforestation. Tear droplets double as seeds, mirroring each other as luminous beads.
The Mahican name for the Hudson (Mahicannituk) translates to “the river that flows both ways” which serves as the title of the second show at artist-run RUTHANN in Catskill, NY. The show is estuarine in nature, with many kinds of flow—the connections between four local artist friends, their material histories, and the energetic shifts between psychic and relational space.
In Erika deVries’s Ghosts of Us (2024), a red argon-neon heart flickers on its sleeve, its gases become arterial. The oval work is layered with shirt sleeves that hang and glow in vertical rows, lit by tubes of neon. The shirts are culled from deVries’s community—her friend Carol’s cuff, one of Alpana Bawa’s designs with mudras, that button down that never fit quite right, and the ones her kids outgrew. The gathering and sorting of clothing is reminiscent of her partner’s transition, and the craft and care of daily adornment.
In Clarity Haynes’s Bearsville Altar (Fall into Winter) (2020), a tableau of objects is carefully staged against a flat lavender ground. A taxidermy bat hangs upside down with its mouth open, fangs out. On loan from Brenda Goodman’s studio, the bat hangs above a postcard reproduction of one of Goodman’s twisty abstractions. There is an uprooted dead plant, a cutting of hair, a sequined scarf, a piece of charred wood once used for drawing, now a kismet echo of Baldwin’s burning ritual. Haynes queers the traditions of the memento mori and Vanitas still life, conjuring the elemental and transient. Their painting is the praxis of staying open, not knowing, inviting. Haynes’s attentive touch makes way for the emancipatory pleasures that pull us from the murk and muck of shame that was never only hers to begin with. Her paintings uplift intergenerational conversations with lesbian elders and trans youth (a forthcoming painting) and the preservation of queer culture that’s too easily snuffed out. Show me what devotion looks like? This is what devotion looks like.
The forms of flow between Baldwin’s interior and exterior landscapes trouble bodily binaries and rational order. They described their symmetries as “splayed open. Take me, eat me, dissect me, but also fuck you.” Their solid frames structure and extend internal imaginaries, the pliable world of paint. Their works remind me of the ways we attempt (or are socialized) to mirror each other, merge, come together and apart. Best Friends Forever (2023) is based on the iconic heart necklace that splits in two. Their stylized frames are inspired by American vernacular wood carvings, and this one reads like a blackened and butterflied turkey, while its painted red, white, blue, and bruisy imagery feels like a vaulted cavity.
Portia Munson collects objects from local thrift stores and yard sales. In one assemblage, roughly twenty “lady figurines,” as Munson calls them, are individually bound with string and rope and glued to a silver serving tray. Munson is drawn to them as objects of instruction, training us in the ways the gender binary are bound to whiteness, to racial capitalism, to class, to innocence. The Yiddish word tchotchke also means “pretty girl,” so these objects become the essence of essentialization. Munson’s altered readymades entice multiple reads: the seductive form of bondage white women have to their men, the patriarchal subjugation of women (back to the burning of witches), and the ways white women maintain white supremacy.
When Fox Calls Grief Circle (2024), deVries’s printed vintage animals gather, maybe to mourn their demise at the hands of humans. The show draws a circle for us to gather and work out the forms of healing and responsibility that art makes possible. The artists speak of the shocking decline of the monarch, the incessant roadkill, the death of trees. One of Haynes’s works is an ode to her Grandma Etta who died in a nursing home during COVID. This show also marks the one year anniversary of deVries’s friend taking their life. There are wooden tears and neon tears and crystal chandelier tears. The show courses with affective and decorative density, materials made maximal. Ruffles beget more ruffles, angels more angels. Embellishment is also the absurd “too-muchness” of femme and feminist joy and anguish. Our embodiment at the end of empire is one of excess.
The works have a shared telos of vulnerability and their flows are vagal. Art is the liminal space which cannot be destroyed, only renewed, only reenacted. Those deeply willing can become students of power. At non-commercial spaces like RUTHANN, gathering is also an art we can hone. Making things that exceed us might also mean making something queer, as in “WTF,” potentially appropriative, self-emancipatory or self-implicating. Tap into the unseen to make something visible. It’s okay, you’re amongst friends.