The Arts Center at Duck Creek presents “Hannah…Hector…Henry…Hermes…” an outdoor, site-specific body of work created by artist Evan Brownstein. The exhibit will open on April 23, and will be on view dawn to dusk through June 26. A reception for the artist will be held on April 23 from 3 to 5 PM.
Brownstein, a photographer and sculptor, moved to the East End during the pandemic. It was in his outdoor studio in Barnes Landing that he first tried-on an unconventional tool: the chainsaw. Using it to carve local felled trees into sculptures, Brownstein conjured the rich history of local artists with his practice. “Making work on the East End of Long Island,” he writes, “comes part and parcel with the spirits of Abstract Expressionism. The reference is inescapable and the active and evocative gestural mark making dominates the local art historical landscapes. Working with a chainsaw allowed me to make gestural marks on substantial sculptural materials in a way that was related to how paint might be applied to a canvas in the studio of an action painter.”
When the Town of East Hampton cut down a dead walnut tree on the edge of Duck Creek Farm last fall, the art center invited Evan Brownstein to give it a second life. The first work executed from the walnut was “Untitled (talaria),” a seven-foot-tall, solid wood sculpture accompanied by three carved wooden chairs. A second work, “Untitled (towards a more complete understanding of calm),” was also created from that same tree. Three more pieces, “Untitled (lamassu),” “Large Crescent Study” and “Column #2” were crafted with local oak supplied by Mark Daniel’s Tree Service in East Hampton.
“The chainsaw was one of the few tools I was left with when COVID displaced me from my usual facility-based workflows,” Brownstein relayed. “Because of this, the marks I was making with this tool seemed tied to time and place in a way that felt important.”
While the title of the show points to the mythological images referenced in the works, the gestural cuts of mature maple and oak invoke the abstract expressionist legends who once populated this property.
Brownstein’s work has also been published in London-based Draft Magazine alongside Joel Sternfeld, Jim Goldberg, Jon Kessler and others. Domestic exhibitions include Tot Lot+ at No Roof Gallery in San Francisco, and group shows at Los Angeles Center for Digital Art in Los Angeles and Greenpoint Gallery in Brooklyn. Brownstein has also been included in the Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art’s public art exhibition “Playground.”