Tara Green and William Eric Brown Show at Duck Creek

The Arts Center at Duck Creek is opening two exhibitions this weekend — “Tara Geer: Sown in the Half Light,” a drawing installation, and “William Eric Brown: Atka,” a show featuring 12 images based on a set of 35mm slides that the artist’s father shot in Antarctica during the 1960s on board the U.S. Navy icebreaker, U.S.S. Atka. Both shows run through August 20.

“Tara Geer: Sown in the Half Light,” opens with a reception on Saturday, July 22, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the John Little Barn. Though drawing is traditionally considered the preparation or practice for, say, painting, Geer harnesses the temporality and quickening of a sketch to make large, monochromatic work with stark emotional power. Her drawings have both expertise and moving roughness. In this first public, large-scale installation of her work, strange bulbs, pale stems and wildly scribbled panels hum with possibility and raw, determined life.

At her studio in Harlem, Geer’s work table is blackened with charcoal, piled with stubs of pencils, charcoal in chunks, crumbling once-white pastels, bowls of used erasers. Drawing has her primary medium for three decades. Though drawing is traditionally considered the preparation or practice for, say, painting, Geer harnesses the temporality and quickening of a sketch to make large, monochromatic work with stark emotional power. Her drawings have both expertise and moving roughness.

After visiting Duck Creek on a bleak day this past winter, Geer started making work specifically for the barn. She has been drawing — and discarding drawings — for this exhibition in alliance with Duck Creek’s mission to honor the spirit of John Little and the majesty of the 20th Century barn that houses the center’s main gallery.

Geer draws, and uses drawing, to uncover the bare bones of making and being. “Not to find the skin of the visible world, but to find what lies, heaving, right beneath it.” The artist will lead a talk and Visual Thinking Strategies discussion with the audience, on Sunday, August 20, at 3 p.m.

“William Eric Brown: Atka” opens with a reception in the Little Gallery at Duck Creek on Saturday, July 22, from 3 to 5 p.m. An artist’s talk with Brown and artist Steve Miller will be held on Sunday, July 23, at 3 p.m.

In this show, Brown enlarges, stitches together and reconstitutes the images shot by his father in the 1960s, using spray paint and diagrammatic charcoal marks to create a new narrative that emphasizes the isolation and remoteness of the landscape and in many respects its relevance to the current climate crisis.

Over a decade ago when he first received the digitized copies of his father, Bill’s, slides, Brown knew he needed to work with them and eventually began making an artist’s book (included in the exhibition) based on a selection from the bank of images. He decided to focus this body of work on a selection of shots featuring massive waterways carved out by the icebreaker U.S.S. Atka, often surrounded by ice shelves that are large floating extensions of glaciers.

As he delved into the work and began the process of reprinting, repurposing and marking the larger-scale images, the subject of environmental impact revealed itself and became more than a subtext. In doing so, the original images now seem to appear as an indelible phantom in the Atka series with thick ice sheets being maneuvered and crushed by U.S. Navy ships to clear a shipping channel, provide safe passage, reach a destination and ultimately fortify territorial outposts. Half a century later, Brown’s son expands, mends, marks and redefines the images by hand to create a new glacial topography –– swathed with recolored ice shelves and drawn diagrammatic lines that suggests the vivisection of vulnerable ice-scapes turned into salvageable, everlasting natural domains.

The Arts Center at Duck Creek is at 127 Squaw Road, East Hampton. For more information, visit duckcreekarts.org.