"Sacred Balance" Opens at East Hampton's Center for Conservation

[caption id="attachment_64717" align="alignnone" width="800"] Scott Bluedorn, Gardiners Island, 33.5" x 45”, ink on paper[/caption]

By Michelle Trauring

For one week, Scott Bluedorn was immersed. Sun, sky, beach, salt, ocean and history, a nearly tangible legacy felt at the Andy Warhol Preserve in Montauk.

The combination fueled him, and informed a body of work that he holds dear — part of which will be on view at “Sacred Balance,” an exhibit opening Saturday at the Center for Conservation in East Hampton.

“My residency at the preserve was like a dream,” Mr. Bluedorn said. “I had unlimited access to the preserve and the beach via a beautiful trail, as well as a home and studio to call my own for a week. I somehow managed to do a lot of work despite the surroundings and urge to just relax and take it all in. I ended up making six little constructions, plus a full-sized ‘beach shack’ made of driftwood and other flotsam as kind of a masterwork.”

[caption id="attachment_64716" align="alignright" width="437"] Kara Hoblin, Young Buck, 24” x 24”, chalk on chalkboard[/caption]

The East End native joins nine other artists from both the South and North Forks, coming together to kick off The Nature Conservancy’s summer season, and to represent a cause greater than themselves, according to curator Beth McNeill-Muhs.

“This is all about sharing our connection to nature — whether it’s our stewardship with nature, our involvement with it, or the beauty that exists within it that we want to maintain, that we want to preserve for generations to come,” she said. “If we’re experiencing the beauty of nature in this exhibition, what is it that you can do to help ensure that this beauty will remain? How can we recreate a resilient community so that the young buck will be running through the forest, so that fluke will still be swimming in our waters, so it won’t be generations to come when people say, ‘What is a fluke, Mommy?’

“We’re hoping people really stop and think about that.”

Ms. McNeill-Muhs, a longtime Southampton resident, certainly has, especially by attending The Nature Conservancy’s annual exhibition. Over the years, she noticed the work had leaned toward realistic interpretations of nature, “which is a very beautiful approach to art,” she said, “but it was time to curate a fresh take on an art exhibition.”

While this group still includes acrylic and oil landscapes, Ms. McNeill-Muhs generally moved in another direction — away from small-format oils and acrylics, and toward larger-scale works in a variety of media, from photography and neon on mirror to sculpture and sun lit cyanotype.

“They’re not necessarily conceptual, but they take philosophy and some ideas of conceptualism into context,” she said of the pieces. “Each artist explores this sacred balance on a different level, and I weaved them together to create a story.

[caption id="attachment_64715" align="alignleft" width="341"] Jeff Muhs, Water Escape, 27” x 32”, oil on panel[/caption]

“I wasn’t familiar with The Nature Conservancy when I decided to take on this show,” she continued. “When I started to learn about their mission and learned about the preservation of the Andy Warhol Montauk estate, which is now used for artist and residents and students exclusively, I thought, ‘Wow, what a great organization that is right in our backyard,’ and I didn’t know what they were really doing.”

Mr. Bluedorn directly utilized the reserve for his series of miniature dwellings and human structures—first conducting research in various architectural traditions and building methods, including Native American, Polynesian and Andean before collecting natural materials from the property, such as phragmite reeds, and conceptualizing how he could interact with the landscape in a way that emphasized distortion of scale, he said.

“I saw the hoodoos and cliffs of the beach as miniature mountain gorges, and the rivulets of water rushing from the ponds to the ocean as actual rivers, much in the way a child might,” he said. “I wanted to recreate manmade structures that mimicked actual size constructions to force a double take in viewing them as photographs, realizing a connection between the way natural features form at any or all size.

“The exhibition theme, ‘sacred balance,’ isn’t just timely now, its timely all of the time,” he continued. “Our mainstream society needs to completely readjust its perspective and come into harmony with the natural world or we will perish. Natural laws necessitate this. My work at the residency echoes that of so-called ‘primitive’ tradition that understood so much of the natural world and how to build and work with nature, not against it. A sacred balance is the ultimate goal for our society now.”

“Sacred Balance,” featuring artists John Alexander, Scott Bluedorn, Bobbie Braun, Tapp Francke, April Gornik, Kara Hoblin, Cynthia Knott, Jerome Lucani, Jeff Muhs, and Cindy Pease Roe, and curated by Beth McNeill-Muhs, will open with a reception on Saturday, June 3, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Center for Conservation in East Hampton. The exhibition will remain on view on weekdays through July 14. Twenty percent of proceeds will benefit The Nature Conservancy’s clean water efforts on Long Island. For more information, call (631) 329- 3981, ext. 19.

[caption id="attachment_64714" align="alignnone" width="800"] Cindy Pease Roe, 60 x 48”, oil on linen[/caption]