What’s Missing? Artworks in the Olana Landscape
Artists Ellen Harvey and Gabriela Salazar Explore Missing Parts of Olana’s History
The Olana Partnership and Olana State Historic Site announced today the upcoming exhibition What’s Missing? Artworks in the Olana Landscape, featuring site-specific installations that respond to missing structures in Olana’s historic landscape. Artist Ellen Harvey will respond to Olana’s mysterious Summer House with an interactive installation titled Winter in the Summer House, and artist Gabriela Salazar will highlight Olana’s icehouse and woodshed with two interrelated pieces titled, A Measure of Comfort (Cake and Cord). This outdoor exhibition will open on Saturday, June 14.
“The Olana Partnership is committed to ensuring that Olana remains a dynamic source of inspiration for contemporary artists, as it was in Frederic Church’s time,” said Sean Sawyer, The Olana Partnership’s President. “This summer’s site-specific commissions from Ellen Harvey and Gabriela Salazar reveal missing elements of Olana’s historic landscape in fascinating ways for all visitors.”
Olana, a New York State Historic Site and National Historic Landmark, is the most intact historic artist’s environment in the United States. Its 250-acre naturalistic landscape, which includes architectural and agricultural elements, was designed by Frederic Church between 1860 and 1900. Despite Olana’s remarkable state of preservation, several of its structures dating to Church’s time no longer exist, or limited evidence has cast a shadow of mystery over their past existence.
While some buildings at Olana may no longer exist, their stories remain embedded within the historic landscape. For What’s Missing?, The Olana Partnership commissioned artists Ellen Harvey and Gabriela Salazar to create site-specific outdoor artworks that respond to these missing pieces of Olana’s history.
Harvey’s project, Winter in the Summer House, will activate the site of the Church family’s “summer house,” which remains one of the big mysteries at Olana. The structure appears on the historic 1886 “Plan of Olana,” but no evidence of its appearance or use exists. Harvey’s installation will take the form of a hexagonal enclosed structure constructed entirely of gilded mirrors reflecting views of Olana’s landscape and surrounding viewshed, which visitors will be invited to enter. “I want people to experience the Olana viewshed the way that Church did — as an artist, literally framing the views,” said Ellen Harvey. “Olana belongs to us all, and this piece is intended to literally and symbolically reflect that. The secret engravings on the inside of the structure are a call-out both to Frederic Church’s famous voyage to find icebergs to paint and also to his ecological legacy. He loved nature and the Hudson Valley landscape so much — and I think we all need to be inspired by that or there will be no icebergs left to paint.”
Salazar’s project, A Measure of Comfort (Cake and Cord), will consist of two interrelated sculptures activating the stone foundations that remain of Olana’s nineteenth-century woodshed and icehouse, both located in the historic farm complex. Salazar explores the duality of the structures’ former functions and the exploitation of natural resources they embodied, one storing ice for cooling and the other wood for heating. “A Measure of Comfort (Cake and Cord) is a reflection on the relationship of the environment and natural resources to human needs for heat and cooling,” said Salazar. “Inspired by and sited on the former foundations of buildings created to store ice and wood for Olana’s inhabitants, and referencing both the larger Hudson Valley watershed as well as the heating system within the walls of the historic house at Olana, the two-part sculpture asks the viewer to reflect on how our desires and needs, both for our bodies and as a society, impact and shape the environment.”
Through the presentation of these site-specific artworks, The Olana Partnership aims to integrate the artists’ interrogations of humankind’s ecological impact within the large-scale environment that Frederic Church designed over many years. What’s Missing? is free and open to all and will inspire visitors to explore Olana’s landscape to discover and experience Harvey and Salazar’s respective works within Olana’s unique blend of art, design and nature.
The Olana Partnership will host an opening event titled, “Art & Landscape at Olana: An Afternoon Conversation and Celebration” on Saturday, June 14, from 4:00-6:00 p.m. This will be the first public program at the new Frederic Church Center for Art & Landscape. The afternoon will consist of a conversation between artists Ellen Harvey and Gabriela Salazar, as well as a dialogue between the Frederic Church Center’s lead designers at Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects and Architecture Research Office.
A reception will follow. More information can be found at OLANA.org/artandlandscape. The Olana Partnership is grateful to the generous supporters who have made What’s Missing? possible. General support for The Olana Partnership’s programs is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Additional support for this project has been generously provided by Dianne Young and Jim Lewis, and by Taconic Engineering.
The exhibition will open on June 14 and run through November 2. Visitors can learn more about What’s Missing?, pick up a walking map, and start their visit to Olana at the newly opened Frederic Church Center for Art and Landscape. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit OLANA.org/whatsmissing
