click to enlarge - Courtesy
- Terschelling, Holland, 2023, research for the project Tidal Meditations for Oerol Festival
The Amy E. Tarrant Gallery at the Flynn in Burlington is only open on Saturday afternoons and to patrons prior to theater shows. Currently, extensive work on Main Street makes just getting to the gallery a bit challenging.
Despite these restrictions, making the effort to experience "Heavy Kinship Vol. 9" is very much worthwhile. Viewers will find an installation that inventively transforms the space and stimulates both eye and mind.
Danish artist Nana Francisca Schottländer works "at the intersection between dance, performance, installation, and conceptual art," according to the Flynn's description. Thus, the large-scale photographs, printed on long scrolls, and looped videos in the gallery are records of her immersive practice.
Accompanying texts explain Schottländer's research-based productions at half a dozen sites around Europe. Heard through headphones, the audio for one of the videos incorporates commentary on Vermont rock: the Green Mountains. ("Our oldest ancestor is called granite...")
Visitors are immediately confronted with the presence of rock. Chips of local red and gray stone are neatly arranged in piles and paths around the gallery, evoking the serenity of a Zen garden. Larger rocks are placed purposefully throughout. In one case, the artist gently proposes communing with a stone the size of a coffee table. Heavy kinship, indeed.
Schottländer explores the "co-creative potentials of encounters between rocks and humans," the Flynn writes. While this relationship can be utilitarian — one video shows Italian workers cutting stone into cobble-size pieces — it is deeply existential, as well. The artist also engages with rock's evolutionary companion: water.
click to enlarge - Courtesy
- Monterosa, Italy, 2022
In a tiny booth in the gallery, viewers can focus on a mesmerizing video of moving water: trickling, cascading, exhaling against a rocky shore. The audio is a veritable guided meditation; Schottländer, whose voice resembles that of American performance artist Laurie Anderson, soothes the listener as she asks "how to understand where I begin and end."
In other videos, the artist can be seen — clothed or nude — moving so slowly among piles of rocks that she seems to be embracing them. In another, several performers, clad in head-to-toe white bodysuits, lie motionless on a beach as the tide flows in around them. They look like human boulders.
Viewers may wonder how this Eurocentric exhibition arrived in Burlington. Flynn executive director Jay Wahl met Schottländer through his involvement on a steering committee in the Copenhagen-based IN SITU, a platform for artistic creations in public spaces. "The Flynn is the only non-European member of IN SITU," he explained. Schottländer is an associate artist and producer. She visited Vermont to design the installation and attend the reception.
"Heavy Kinship" is, in essence, about humans and interconnectedness with the rest of the natural world. That can be a fraught topic, but Schottländer is neither dogmatic nor woeful.
"I thought about Vermont's relationship of rock and climate and the economy," Wahl said. "And here's this artist who's asking these questions. There's something exceedingly timely about what she's doing."