Exhibitions —

What is it to feel rubble? To sense the imprecious, washed up or broken off? Alongside presumed waste comes life; nooks and cracks to fill and nest within.

Situated inside 403 Colonels Row on Governors Island, feel rubble assembles historic photographs by Beverly Buchanan, a sculpture and films by Betty Beaumont, and recent sculptures by Gabriela Salazar. These three artists’ distinct approaches to materials and scale find common ground in a language of endurance, memory, and the limits of knowability. Each understands materials—for example, concrete, styrofoam, coal fly ash, dirt, wood, and paper—as unexpected, inconspicuous messengers.

Wedged against an interior threshold, Gabriela Salazar’s In Fill (2022) forms a lumpen, careful triangle. It incorporates the outside washed in: detritus from across this island found, sorted, and assessed. It nearly breaches the doorway. Nearby, hardened security envelopes rest on three long, glass-topped tables. Holding the once- liquid remnants of the artist’s studio practice, In Securities (2014-ongoing) eke out the capacity of their containers, pushing against time and themselves. Salazar’s investment in architecture, site, and the environment use the island as a source and its rubble as a collaborator.

Beverly Buchanan’s color photographs, all made in the early 1990s, are four of many images the artist took while living in the American South that document vernacular architecture and the lives lived in such spaces. Buchanan— widely known for her “shack sculptures” of the same subject matter—had a keen eye for rubble. In the 1970s and 1980s, the artist made a number of earthworks (smaller, discrete sculptures and a few site-specific works in Georgia) out of cast concrete and tabby. Ruinous from conception, Buchanan’s outdoor sculptures are inherently unlike most public artworks; they are unremarkable yet commanding in their still-aroundness.

In dialogue with Salazar and Buchanan, works by Betty Beaumont orbit an artwork that isn’t here and can’t even be seen. From 1978 to 1980, Beaumont completed a large-scale, site-specific work on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, 40 miles from this very harbor off the coast of Fire Island National Seashore. Comprising 500 tons of coal fly ash waste formed into blocks, Ocean Landmark intended to reclaim an area of heavy ocean dumping into a flourishing reef. It is still there, and fish have returned.

Implicitly unviewable, Ocean Landmark’s integrity as an artwork, as expressed by the artist, “resides in its invisibility.” The films and sculpture on view in this house offer glimpses into the artist’s research and process of completing Ocean Landmark. Each is a distinct effort to visualize the invisible and imagine the inaccessible, yet in no way can they claim any certainty in their varied conjurings. In particular, The Object operates as a kind of imperfect surrogate; a pile of 17,000 hand-painted styrofoam blocks made in 1978 to gain a sense of the scale and mass of the project.

Rubble, in all of its ubiquity, echoes of built environments. Today it speaks to yesterday and tomorrow’s circumstance, enduring time and transformation, noticings and forgettings. It is fill fallen out. Feeling rubble is a chance to see rubble.

This exhibition is a project of the Gallatin WetLab and was generously supported by NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Gabriela Salazar was born in New York City to architects from Puerto Rico. She has had solo exhibitions at NURTUREart; The Bronx River Arts Center; The Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island; Efrain Lopez Gallery, Chicago; The River Valley Arts Collective at the Al Held Foundation, New York, and with the Climate Museum, in Washington Square Park, NYC. Her work has been included in group shows at Socrates Sculpture Park, the Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The Drawing Center, David Nolan Gallery, Candice Madey Gallery, Storm King Art Center, and upcoming (November 23) at the Whitney Museum, in no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria. Salazar’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Residencies include Workspace (LMCC); Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Abrons Arts Center, “Open Sessions” at The Drawing Center, and the Socrates Emerging Artist Fellowship. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Yale University, and lives, works, and teaches in NYC.

Betty Beaumont was born in Toronto, Canada and currently lives and works in New York. She has received prestigious grants and awards including the 2006 Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California at Berkeley, and grants from Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the Gottlieb Foundation, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. In addition to numerous exhibitions in galleries in Europe, Asia, and the US, she has shown internationally at museums including The Centre Pompidou-Metz (France), The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandria, Egypt), National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto and Tokyo), Museum Het Domein (Sittard, Netherlands), Bibliotéca Nacional José Marti (Havana, Cuba), Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, Queens Museum, Hudson River Museum (Yonkers, NY), and Katonah Museum (Katonah, NY). Beaumont has held academic positions at the University of California at Berkeley, SUNY Purchase, Hunter College, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, and Columbia University.

Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) was born in Fuquay, North Carolina. She was the recipient of numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1980) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980). Her work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. The work has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at Steinbaum Krauss Gallery in New York in 1996 and ‘98, Shackworks, a traveling mid-career retrospective hosted by the Montclair Museum of Art (New Jersey), and most recently, a posthumous solo retrospective, Ruins and Rituals, curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2016-17.