‘Listening to Land’ group exhibition opens July 15

“Listening to Land” is a group exhibition exploring practices of listening in relation to place and the place-making potential of creative acts of listening, wherein to land is a verb, and listening provides a point of ingress.

The exhibition will be on display at the Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh and will open July 13, with an opening reception on July 15 from 4 – 7 p.m. It will run through Aug. 27. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.

The gallery will be open Thursday evenings 4-6 p.m. and Saturdays 1-5 p.m. for the run of the exhibition, with extended hours 11 a.m.-5 p.m. for Upstate Art Weekend, July 22-23.

Artists in the exhibition use storytelling, jam-making, woodworking, basketry, mapping, lenses, microphones, speakers, and other technologies to heighten the ability to relate to our surroundings and other beings, and to extend the capacity to perceive beyond what is visible or knowable in the landscape. Prehistoric, mythical, and contemporary techniques used by the artists help us to imagine futures in which humans are in more reciprocal relationships with each other and the broader cosmology of entities with whom we share the land.

The exhibition offers sounds, portals, and moments of suspension, aiming to inspire silence, slowness, and humility. Materials such as wood, water, stone, clay, plants, glass, metal, horsehair, and minerals act as conduits for the voices of the land from whence they came. The artists invoke the non-human presences of specific places through ultrasensitive explorations of their materials’ inherent qualities and capabilities, inviting us to pause, and reshaping our perceptions.

The works in the exhibition suggest that when one listens to land, the land reveals entanglements with intangible forces and phenomena, with buried histories and lost kinships, and with water systems. Rather than rendering landscapes that delineate land from water, human activity, or the cosmos, the works in the exhibition translate images of landscape into abstractions, experiences, revisions, and mappings that allow us to know the land through intricate and interconnected relationships.

“Listening to Land” includes artists Margaux Crump, Katerie Gladdys, Katie Grove, Ellie Irons, Kite and Robbie Wing, Fernanda Mello, Steve Rossi, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, Millicent Young, and others.

Free public programming supporting the exhibition will include engagements with several artists, beginning with a hands-on Basswood Cordage Workshop on July 23 during Upstate Art Weekend with artist and educator Katie Grove. On August 19, Interdisciplinary artist and educator Ellie Irons will lead a hands-on foraging and paint-making workshop focused on the wild, weedy, and feral plants who green the city streets and shoreline of current-day Newburgh. Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer, Kite, aka Dr. Suzanne Kite, and Robbie Wing, artist and musician from Oklahoma & Citizen of the Cherokee Nation will lead a workshop called Listening to Nonhumans on August 26th. More information will be available on our website closer to these events.

The Ann Street Gallery is located at 104 Ann St. in Newburgh. For more information, log onto annstreetgallery@safe-harbors.org.

Cutline: Kite, Nuŋȟwáuŋzazapi (We Only Hear Snatches of What is Said), Photograph, 3’ x 4’, 2022.