Carol Hepper: The Skin of Things FOREWORD BY ESSAY BY INTERVIEW BY Sally Wright Oliver Shultz Patterson Sims Published on the occasion of the exhibition Artwork © 2018 Carol Hepper BOARD OF DIRECTORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Text © 2018 Oliver Shultz, Patterson Sims, and Carol Hepper: The Skin of Things Sally Wright David Barnes, President My gratitude goes to Sally Wright, who CAS Arts Center Biography Photo © O N E E V E R Y O N E Carol, Catherine DeNatale, Vice President envisioned, coordinated, and ushered this June 30–August 25, 2018 2014, pigment print on gampi. From Leanne Stuhlmiller, Treasurer exhibition into being. Her intelligence, poise, O N E E V E R Y O N E at the ADAA Art Show, Robyn Almquist, Secretary and professionalism made the process an First edition published in 2018 Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY. Thurman Barker absolute pleasure. I would like to thank Patterson Courtesy Ann Hamilton Studio and Alessandra Gouldner Sims, who not only introduced me to Sally, but Edition of 600 Carl Solway Gallery. Ultan Guilfoyle also conducted a wide-ranging interview and James Karpowicz painstakingly edited it into a cohesive read. Oliver CAS ARTS CENTER Publisher: Catskill Art Society Tony Lance Shultz, with his deep knowledge and astute 48 Main Street Copyeditor: Katherine Atkins Simone Nicole McGurl perception, has contributed an invaluable essay Livingston Manor, NY 12758 Photoeditor: Natasha Otrakji Joni Wehrli to this catalogue. This beautifully designed book Design: Ninze Chen-Benchev would not have been possible without Ninze ARTISTS COUNCIL Chen-Benchev. I would also like to acknowledge my studio manager, the photographer Natasha Mac Adams Otrakji, for her spot-on color corrections and Ellen Brooks photo-editing assistance. I am indebted to you all Francis Cape for contributing your considerable talents to this Patterson Sims exhibition and publication. Andrew Waggoner Joni Wehrli Carol Hepper Bing Wright New York City May 3, 2018 We are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others. All intellectual property appearing in this book belongs to the respective copyright holders. © 2018 CATSKILL ART SOCIETY ISBN 978-0-692-12807-7 Foreword It is my great pleasure and honor to present As an artist, Hepper pays close attention to Carol Hepper: The Skin of Things as Catskill Art materiality, often working with discarded Society’s third Invitational Show at CAS Arts natural items like the hides and pelts of Center. The annual Invitational Show program animals and the skin of fish to highlight the allows CAS greater time and resources to present transience and ephemerality of the medium. exhibitions of considerable importance in the field She manages to capture both permanence of contemporary art. Since 2007 CAS Arts Center and meaning from something that is normally has been a vibrant arts destination for visitors considered a byproduct. In doing so, Hepper from the region, New York City, and beyond, brings greater consciousness to the man-made bridging the gap between pastoral and cultural, world and our destructive habits of consumption rural and urban. In an increasingly globalized and disposal, joining the public conversation world that seemingly feels more atomized, locality about global change. is at a premium. Identity and self are inextricably linked to place and origin, and are often how Hepper, an unwavering advocate for the natural audiences extrapolate meaning. CAS reflects its world and now also for CAS, has become a dear locality in its name as well as through its artists friend. I am indebted to her generosity of spirit and exhibitions, presenting artistic excellence in and time in helping realize this exhibition and the western Catskills. catalogue, along with that of Patterson Sims and Oliver Shultz. Their contributions to the book and Carol Hepper is no exception. Born in 1953 in curatorial process brought a level of excellence McLaughlin, South Dakota, she has split her time and professionalism previously unseen at CAS. between New York City and Jeffersonville, New I am proud to share Carol Hepper: The Skin of York, for the past twenty years. Hepper’s upstate Things and the eponymous publication with our studio has provided the latitude to expand the members and community at large. I hope it will scale and scope of her practice, allowing her to challenge and inspire audiences to reconsider take on larger and unyielding mediums: namely mankind’s role within the arts and environment. wood. Having grown up on the expansive plains in the heart of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, she was taken by the magnitude of trees of the Sally Wright densely forested Catskill Mountains. Much of Executive Director, Catskill Art Society the art present in this exhibition was produced in her Jeffersonville studio with material derived directly from the land, such as cuttings from the apple trees that she prunes. Her work examines the memory and temporality contained in wood and offers an archaeological record for years past, including the environmental conditions and invasive species of the area. Carol Hepper: In a 1984 color photograph taken in South Later, that specificity would expand to include the Dakota, a desolate expanse of the prairie Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, home to unfolds before us. A landscape of rolling hills another mythic landscape of Americanness—that The Skin of Things and parched grasses rise upward, describing of Thomas Cole and Asher Brown Durand—where a gently undulating contour of horizon against Hepper has maintained a home and studio for the a cloudless sky. Looming in the foreground is past two decades. While the Hudson River School an elegant and enigmatically arched structure; may have been far afield from her conscious it is composed of translucent, alabaster-colored concerns as an artist, her practice remains fabric stretched across a rigid armature, twisting haunted by a peculiarly American relationship in a way that echoes the shape of the hills between the body and landscape, between behind it. Composed from sheets of tanned deer culture and nature. On the one hand, the early hide affixed to a curved framework of willow hide works draw on her experience of Native branches, Seven Stroke Roll is one among a American culture, which surrounded her in the group of monumental sculptures that Carol form of cultural traditions from the architectural Hepper created from wood, bone, and animal to the ritual.1 They also recall indigenous hide during the early 1980s. She photographed philosophies regarding making and using, these works outdoors in the landscape of South particularly in relation to the bodies of animals. Dakota, where she was born and raised in a Yet the photographs also suggest that Hepper’s family of cattle ranchers. Suggesting fragmentary, work is deeply concerned with contemporary porous, and uninhabitable architecture, Hepper’s culture. It is not merely that her sculptures can photographs make her sculptures appear as if be understood in relation to contemporary artists emerging from the landscape rather than placed who engaged the landscape in the 1970s and upon it, pointing to a closeness between work 1980s, from Robert Smithson to Michelle Stuart, and world—between the language of nature but also that they suggest a certain urgency with and the language of art—that has informed her regard to empathy, which resonates in our age of practice ever since. digital disembodiment. by Oliver Shultz In 1982 a group of Hepper’s work was exhibited In the mid-1990s, around the same time that for the first time in New York, where they were she began frequenting the Catskills, Hepper installed in the dilapidated galleries of what was started stitching together large tapestries of then the alternative space known as P.S.1 (now luminescent fishskins in her studio in Chinatown. MoMA PS1). In a photograph that documents this She preserved the skins in a process analogous to influential exhibition, we see her sculptures once her treatment of animal hides, cleaning, tanning, again stretched out, this time across the linoleum and stretching them herself. After preserving floor of the old school building. A construction of them, she painted the resulting objects, endowing cattle bones is suspended just beyond the frame the dulled and faded scales with an iridescence of the photograph. From the perspective of art that recalled the shimmer they had lost in death. history, Hepper’s oeuvre itself has remained just After stitching them together into a tapestry, she beyond the frame. It has garnered considerable suspended the entire object vertically, several notoriety, but like the work of other key women inches off the gallery wall. The resulting works, artists of her generation—some of whom, like like the monumental form of Tsunami (2000), do Jackie Winsor and Tina Girouard, she met and not so much hang as float. They suggest ghostly befriended in the late 1970s—it has often been schools of aquatic bodies woven together in overlooked. This may in part have to do with the space. They seem both to arrest and preserve way Hepper’s art is both radically specific and the kinetic quality of the dead creatures that placeless. Her work is stretched thin between comprise them, imbuing the remnants with an far-flung locales: the vast open spaces of uncanny vivacity. The memory of the fish from the American West, where she was raised by which the skins originated is preserved, and the descendants of homesteaders amongst the living creature is simultaneously transformed Sioux tribes of Standing Rock, and the bustling into something else entirely. Nature is reborn as metropolis of New York City, where she has been animate artifice. based since the mid-1980s. The arrival of the fish in Hepper’s work also us as a material entity in a world.