“Space speaks if you allow the stillness”
“Sequences: Ode to Minor White,” curated by Katherine Gass Stowe, is a group show of contemporary works reflecting the aesthetic and philosophical ideas of the photographer, writer, and educator Minor White (1908-1976). Artists include Jessica Judith Beckwith, Andrea Belag, William Eric Brown, Niqui Carter, and Kevin Larmon, with a selection of vintage photographs by White on loan from the Bank of America Art Collection. Gass Stowe will offer a tour of the exhibit on Thursday, August 19, at 7:30 p.m.
Jessica Judith Beckwith’s contribution to the exhibit is “The Seed,” an art installation in an apple orchard at Gass Stowe’s house in Walpole, New Hampshire. Video of the installation is on view at BMAC, and Gass Stowe welcomes visitors to experience “The Seed” in person on select Thursday evenings, weather permitting, through October 2021. BMAC spoke with Beckwith and Gass Stowe about the origins of “The Seed” and how it relates to the work of Minor White.
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center: What were the beginnings of this project?
Jessica Judith Beckwith: Katie, you’re the beginning, really. The epiphany came to you first.
Katherine Gass Stowe: I’ve always loved Minor White. I've been deeply inspired by his photography for a long time. Years ago, I started to see in contemporary artwork shades of the philosophies that White worked so hard to capture in his photography and in his writing. This is a show I've been carrying around with me for many, many years, and Danny [Lichtenfeld, BMAC Director] gave me the opportunity to do it at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, which was a gift.
Minor White, Stony Brook State Park, New York (1960), gelatin silver print, 8 x 9 inches, on loan from the Bank of America Collection. Reproduced with permission of The Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. © Trustees of Princeton University
Minor White often talked about photography as prayer. His photography was a conveyor for other things, and you sense that immediately. The spirituality inherent in his work was something that always inspired and resonated with me.
Jessica was a spontaneous addition quite at the end of the process of planning the exhibit. We met through the Kundalini yoga world and had shared some thoughts around spirituality, and then I got to know her work. I was very excited by the idea of having an installation as part of the show, since I was trying to illustrate or exemplify Minor White’s philosophies through different media—painting, sculpture, photography, prints—and Jessica rounded that out with her installation, which is fabulous and adds a really wonderful component to the show.
Jessica works with light as a medium, literally finding ways to catch it and throw it around different spaces. Her other projects have dealt with light in various ways, which is why we both understood that she was perfect for this exhibit.
Beckwith: It was so exciting that Katie thought to include my work. She’s got this ability to pick up on the subtle stream, and that is what I think is really interesting about the exhibition overall.
BMAC: Jessica, what was your process like when you started to work on “The Seed”?
Beckwith: At first, I was just awed by the opportunity, and then awed by the space. The land is stunning and extensive. But then the land speaks. I think space speaks if you allow the stillness, and that’s something I kept getting from Minor White.
The process is about walking into the image and feeling the frequency of the image. It’s less about the actual image and more about the way images bring up things in juxtaposition, the way they are sequenced. And then the movement became important. And that’s what everything became in the end—movement—and we couldn't know that at first. Katie and I kept discovering things together.
“The Seed” is in an apple orchard, and the apple orchard represents the original seed of a lot of our cultural belief systems (in the West, specifically). The disparity between some of those beliefs and understandings and the truth of the internal, “felt” space creates confusion and pain. David Bohm was a physicist from the 1950s who was ostracized at the time, but later, people realized that his theories actually solved the disparities and confusions that were going on in physics at the time. Bohm got really interested in society and culture and the ways in which we think, and he believed that the next stage of our evolution would involve breaking up the confusions that we were causing ourselves—and that part of doing that would be having presence together without preconceived notions, so that we could discover authenticity. So we could discover what was actual, not what we thought was actual.
And I think that’s what Minor White was doing, and he was way ahead of his time in that way. That’s what’s amazing about art: that we abstract form to find these resonances that make us say, “I don't know why, but that feels fantastic. I love looking at that, I love that color. I can’t put language to it, but that really means something to me.”
There is a thread that resonates throughout Minor White’s work and has affected so many people, but I’m not sure how easy it is for people to define that thread. In some of White’s writings, there’s a subtextual element of struggle with accepting his homosexuality. White grappled, I believe, with the divergence between what he felt as truth inside himself and the perceptions of the culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Being homosexual was still listed as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and wasn't completely removed until 1987. White worked to resolve those disparities through sensations—through light, through juxtaposing imagery—and he realized truths that couldn’t necessarily be articulated because they were different from the reality that had been decided upon at that point.
Right now, I think we’re experiencing another breaking up of the form. It happens constantly, but we’re in a really deep need right now for shattering. And I think that’s what’s so fantastic about offering this exhibition now. As a curator, you think of a project years in advance. You get the seed and then it just finds its time, and it is perfection.
Gass Stowe: It’s really interesting that you brought up White’s homosexuality, because that was a very important thing in the back of my mind when I was curating the show—not that he was gay, but that he struggled with his sexual orientation.
Beckwith: Right, it’s not the thing itself—it’s the way that it affects perception. And I think that’s the gift and the trauma of being different, especially when it’s before a society or culture arrives at a point of understanding. White’s homosexuality was nascent in the sense that he lived before the time when it has become more and more out in the open in our culture.
William Eric Brown, Shelter 4 (2017), bronze, 8.125 x 7 x 8.25 inches, from Sequences: Ode to Minor White
Gass Stowe: Exactly. White didn't have language for the things that he was feeling at the time. There were societal pressures and barriers preventing him from expressing himself in his true way out in the world. But all of that was channeled through his artwork. It’s interesting that many of the artists in “Sequences” are also gay. It’s not something that I sought, but there’s a sensitivity there around understanding different kinds of languages. Eric Brown’s sculptures, for instance, are cast bronze but they look like they're made out of foam core. They're beautiful things that aren't the things that people think they are, and they're about the interior life of those sculptures, and they're very subtle. And that’s the connection that as a curator I was interested in. I don't know that people will necessarily pick up on that unless they do a super deep dive into Minor White. But that’s also the beauty, right? There are leagues and leagues you could dive into around his work and his thought and his life—and our lives now.
BMAC: Katherine, what is it like for you to experience “The Seed” in your own yard every day?
Gass Stowe: From the start of the project, we always talked about a nighttime projection of the film. What I wasn't expecting was how Jessica was able to create a site-specific, immersive sculptural experience that would change throughout the whole day. One of its absolute sweet spots is the time just before dusk.
Credit: Michelle Frehsee
I wake up to “The Seed.” It’s in front of our bedroom window, and I watch it change throughout the day. I have a personal relationship with it. I’m out there fixing things, moving things, protecting things, and so I have an absolutely corporeal relationship with this very ephemeral piece.
There are physical things that your body responds to as you're walking through the orchard. At the same time, “The Seed” is all about the ephemeral. Wind is a collaborator—the wind is always present in different magnitudes. When the wind is very subtle, it interacts with the piece in one way. When the wind has dialed itself up, there’s a whole other kind of interaction.
“The Seed” is kind of like Kundalini yoga. Once you're still in the space and allow yourself the opportunity to get quiet with the sculptures, the experience opens up different channels of understanding. You start to understand information through your sensory body. It’s like walking through my favorite Minor White photographs. It’s like Oz—it’s that moment when it goes from black and white to color on the yellow brick road. It’s a whole new language. There’s new physical language, new emotional language, new sensory language. The piece is meant to be physically experienced, and it opens up not just the six senses, but other more subtle avenues of understanding, once you quiet down enough.
Beckwith: Ever since my early work, I’ve wanted to figure out how to immerse people in the experience. I wanted the experience to wrap around, and I wanted to figure out how to hold people in that space.
In my first artistic collaboration, “I'd Like To Ask You A Question_ Merging Answers In The Communal Space,” my goal was to eliminate a sense of isolation, because we live in our heads, and we think we’re having an experience that no one else is having, even if intellectually, we know better. In the piece, there was a cacophony of sound in the center of the room that was meant to be kind of a holding, where you would feel more a part of the collective. But I had a woman walk up to me and say, “I hate this kind of art. This is shit.” And I thought, Wow, that’s awesome. I touched a nerve. If somebody hates it, it wasn't bland! Something happened.
It also occurred to me, though, that I wanted to find subtler and subtler ways of working, where there wasn't a sense of aggression, there was no forced interaction—and that’s such a fine line. With “The Seed,” I feel like I created that sense in a way that I hadn't been able to before, and it was because of nature’s participation. It’s good to be able to figure out how you can do less as an artist. I think I was able to get out of the way more this time than I ever have before, and that was really lovely.
BMAC: Jessica, you describe the materials that make up “The Seed” as “light, projection, wind, halo sculptures out of PETG, knitting circles, cellophane, fabric, mirrors, and an apple orchard.” The projection is a film—could you talk a little bit more about the making of the film?
Beckwith: It took months to make. I don't know how many times I remade it. The process I used goes back to what Minor White did: you just keep laying the images next to each other until the meaning is clear. When you move an image, it changes again, and that keeps happening again and again.
In terms of the images in the film, I started with soil. I got a five-pound bag of soil and brought it to my studio, and I filmed my hands reaching up and through and holding the soil. There was a connection to the Earth that I was exploring. I also explored some of the Japanese watercolors that Minor White was really influenced by. I started painting Japanese watercolors, and then I merged images of my hands and body with the watercolor paintings in Photoshop. There are images of birds in the film, and of lightbulbs, which are a reference to a Joseph Campbell story about trying to teach children what consciousness is.
Rhythm is really important—the biorhythm of the body, of nature itself, of the way the wind moves, and the sun. There’s a deep conversation that is going on. Kundalini yoga is rhythmic, and those rhythms wake different relationships up. So I was exploring that in parts of the video. I think poached eggs are magical—because of the rhythm of the boiling water, but also because the white of the egg is angelic, and the way it catches the light is incredible. I had a dozen eggs, and I just kept cracking the eggs and filming it.
I was playing with light in different ways in the film, and I was playing with different veils. I kept coming back to the body. The body had to be in there. I had some milky architectural paper that is really stunning in the way it spreads and catches and holds light—a little bit like light coming through skin. I backlit the paper, and I was behind it, pressed up against the paper. There are historical images in the film, too, and moments of catastrophic shifting in our consciousness. The Tower of Babel is in there. 9/11 is in there—an image of two women holding each other and walking through the rubble. The Arab Spring is in there.
And there are personal moments in there. I felt like my mother was present in the work. There are old family photographs that I shot through veils that distorted and enhanced the light, so that it feels like light is coming through the bodies. Those moments, and the knitting circles [circular wooden frames for knitting that were used in the installation], are about lineage and our histories, and the way the matriarch weaves the stories that hold us but bind us. What would it mean to remove that, and for it to be an opening?
Gass Stowe: That’s why Jessica used cellophane trapped in between the two rings of the knitting circles. It becomes a field of pure potential, instead of a field of contracted narrative that you're stuck in.
Beckwith: It creates a space of discovery and an open opportunity to find our own story.
Videography by Little Pond Digital, LLC. Produced by Brattleboro Museum & Art Center and James Company Contemporary Art Projects.
