opening reception: July 11, 5-7pm
on view at PS1 Close House: July 11 - August 9
during open hours or by appointment (gallery@publicspaceone.com)
Hickory Hill’s nearly 200 acres are situated just a mile from my house. If you haven’t been, it’s a gorgeous tract of mixed woodland and prairie, with Ralston creek gathering steam from its sloping ravines as it etches its way through the park. Cobbled together over the years through shrewd advocacy of a few and valuation of many, it is now penned in at its final size by residential development.
Last fall I began working in earnest in Hickory Hill. Admittedly always a little dismissive of plein air painting as the territory of Sunday painters, fully chagrined, I have found working outdoors with fleeting subject matter urgent and exciting – impending rain, humidity, ticks, poison ivy and icy toes, logistical challenges and great rewards. Painting provides the excuse to stay in one spot and really look, audience to the growth of plants, turning of leaves, the silent movement of barred owls and foxes, the advent of songbirds, and the tireless industry of chipmunks. Every work in this show was made outdoors on location.
The park is a bit of a violent place: snag ash trees, overgrown honeysuckle, silt filled creeks, and unrelenting storm damage as the woodland ages all at once into our unraveling climate. The morning chorus sparkles over the dull roar of engines on I-80 and the intermittent pounding of sheepsfoot rollers compacting the soil beneath encroaching development. Deer browse amidst the episodic cicada-like drone of chainsaws. The more I work in the park, the more interested I’ve become in the evidence of its inherent tension. Trees torn apart, muscled into raw, suspended gesture. Chopped logs float adrift in a sea of emerging mayapples. The seemingly endless baggies of hermetically sealed dog shit sprinkled amongst piles of cleared invasives. It all reminds us how un-wild this place is.
And yet, as compromised as the park is in its nuanced ways, how wonderful it is that the vision of our neighbors preserved it. Time spent in Hickory Hill bears witness to the breadth of its audience. The morning invites birders and warbler walks, the afternoon's spandexed joggers, shifting gradually to evening dog walkers. Children build forts and squelch in the streams on the weekends, as couples wander lost on first dates, and crews of the well intentioned clear invasive species. Mushroom hunters foraging quietly off trail amongst them all.
In a state that has handed over the vast balance of its land to line the pockets of agricultural industrialists and tailored its weak regulations to hem the bottom line for developers, Hickory Hill’s cherished whisper of wilderness reminds us of how much of our natural landscape we have lost. “This is a great place to live and it doesn’t happen by chance,” said Carrie Norton who along with her late husband Dee Norton have been vital advocates and benefactors to the park. “The way you make a community is to mobilize. A community becomes wonderful because people invest themselves and make it happen.” With its towering hickory trees, carpets of spring ephemerals, swelling oysters, glowing fall bluestem, and curiously tame deer, I am grateful for Hickory Hill’s refuge. More please.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Thomas Agran (b. 1986 in Stanford, Kentucky) studied fine art at Grinnell College before receiving an MFA in painting from Indiana University. Raised primarily in Ohio and currently residing in Iowa, his work focuses on the landscape of middle America, its total transformation through agriculture and development, and the political, social, and environmental consequences of that change. Some bodies of work also explore the complicated nexus of food, agriculture, nostalgia, and marketing. Recent work in the tallgrass prairies of Kansas and the sparse, vestigial natural areas of Iowa situates patient observation and lively mark making as increasingly central to Agran’s practice. An experienced muralist, Agran’s public projects eschew the more garish, increasingly homogenous and repetitive mural tropes of “creative placemaking,” in favor of painterly language and the warmth of human touch as a central motif in public space. His work can be found in public, private, and corporate collections, including dozens of municipal scale mural projects in the public sphere. Thomas lives with his family in Iowa City, Iowa.