Review: A Gallery Show at A Blue Farm
A Blue Farm is a generational project, and current host Nick Kasuric has taken up the mantle. He has built on a foundation established by his family of having a relationship with the land one inhabits and with other inhabitants of that land. His ethos, I think, is to consider land as a living and active participant in the work we make, which we must respect, involve, and make an effort to sustain as a show of gratitude. A Blue Farm is an idyllic setting, but its richness comes from the tender love and care of its faithful steward and its layers of history, much like the layers of subterranean clay, that permeate the land. Nick takes care to name the land’s previous interactions as a habitat for American Indian people, a workhorse farm, a dairy and beef farm, and now as something dedicated to arts and craft. Alongside this intimacy with the land, Nick maintains the devotion to craftsmanship as a cornerstone of the farm, and the message is firm: if you’re going to use a resource from the land you’re on, take care in what you make with it. With such a rich history and ethical stance, the task for Nick and the farm will be to continuously find ways of giving back resources whenever possible; which may mean becoming a community resource, or raising funds and materials for artists indigenous to Southwestern PA, or artists from the rural area of Southwestern PA. Whatever the mode of return, I have no doubt he and the farm are up for the task. When I saw the farm for the first time, bursting with trees, flowers, and a beautiful pond, a mantric thought pulsed in my mind like a heartbeat, “Thank goodness this place has people who love it.”
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Upon arrival, I find a blue house, the farm’s namesake, that greets the road, and as I turn down the long, sloping driveway the farm opens up before me. Although a thick coat of silence lays on the area, I hear distant chatter coming from the main barn, backlit by the setting sun. I find the owner there, Nick, and the artist whose show is on display, Azzah Sultan, surrounded by family and friends from the neighborhood and afar. The intimacy is enhanced by the warm June evening, and the layers upon layers of historical artifacts stuffed into any available niche create a clutter of fascination in my mind. Nick tells me about the renovations he’s done on the two smaller barns on the property and on the blue house, along with the trees and flowers he’s planted to encourage native flora to thrive. He also tells me about the classes that have been taught, the focus on ceramics, woodworking, and stained glass; there is a rich tradition being born here in giving back with what was provided. We tour the perimeter of the property and find a field that has been repopulated with trees, grasses, and wildflowers, giving the fireflies a place to glimmer wildly. We return to the back of the barn, where sits the old silo from when the land was used for dairy farming. It’s situated opposite 55 gallon drums of harvested clay, symbols of the changing relationships with the land. Its new purpose: to serve as a space for thoughtful artistic generation, a way of creating work informed by the land it's made on. As we return inside the barn, to my left is the installation of Azzah Sultan’s work, which carries that purpose proudly.
Azzah’s show, titled things we’ve kept treasured and forgotten, hitches itself firmly to the farm’s mission. Implicit in that mission, I think, is making work in plain consideration of the place you make it, and Azzah answered that call faithfully. The gallery space is a large room off to theside of the main area of the barn. It’s got a concrete floor, wooden-slat walls and exposed ceiling beams where you can see the insulation. The room has bones and there is no effort to hide it. It’s antithetical to the white-cube format of many contemporary galleries. I believe this is necessary. Art can never be fully separated from the place in which it’s made and to attempt to do so can undermine its narrative strength. Art does not need to be shown in a vacuum to be powerful, and in the case of Azzah’s show, it’s clear that it’s much more powerful being shown in a “full” room as opposed to an empty one.
The bright green paint on the walls and on some of the wood trim, along with the green screen fabric placed throughout the room is what first stands out. How different from the neutral tones of pale and dark brown unfinished wood that surround it. I think it sends a powerful message of attempting to erase the spaces in which we treasure our objects. The green screen, to me, is a symbol of grafting settings that aren’t really there onto a place that is. It’s an attempt to cover up the existing reality beneath and fabricate something more desirable. It plays into Azzah’s theme of detachment from objects, to remove objects from their place into a liminal setting like a green screen depersonalizes them. Which brings me to the objects themselves. What stands out in Azzah’s installation are the handmade clay vessels and stained glass fish that dangle from the ceiling in open-air schools. Azzah’s main investigation, I think, in her work is how can we create objects, form an attachment to the materials we used and the time spent with the object, and subsequently let it go? I think it’s a question worth asking. In a time of severe displacement of people around the globe, erasure of our constitutionally protected rights in the United States, and the ever-AI-ification of artistic processes, how do we feel once the dust has settled and we learn that our treasured objects have been made to dust as well, or worse, non-existent. How can you detach? She addresses this question on a smaller scale before me with her own handcrafted treasured objects. She incorporates the land of A Blue Farm lovingly in her installation by using clay farmed to make pots and bowls. She develops a relationship with the material that bears items and must sit with that relationship. It means something to me that each clay item Azzah made is a vessel, a container. I think of Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution; that we grew as a society from being able to hold things, to take things with us on our temporal journeys; items to comfort, nourish, and remind us of loved ones when we were far from home in the cold, dark night. The vessels’ purpose is to hold. Hold the food that sustains us, hold the water that nourishes us, hold our treasured items, our everyday items, hold us. And by the nature of human life, we cannot always hold back. We must let go of our objects, we must move, we must lose things, we must break things. How do we lose things we treasure deeply, and go on? What is the meaning we assign to our things? Who do they represent to us, and after a long enough time who do they stop representing?
Azzah’s installation doesn’t seek to find an answer, but rather explores the experience of living in such a question, the experience of spending time with an object borne of you, imbued with your skin and sweat and breath that creates a difficulty in letting go of that object. It’s a heavy weight Azzah has created to make such a relationship with materials from the land that holds her, made heavier by the fact that she cannot always hold it back. But what fills the space between that is love and tenderness towards what she’s been given, and the will to share it with others.That is ultimately what, I think, is important about Nick’s project here with A Blue Farm. A Blue Farm is a sustaining feature of a healthy artistic ecosystem, a part of the fabric that keeps rural art production alive. It is bonding material in a region that allows human relationships to fortify. The spirit of giving and relating is alive through Nick, his family, and all of the artists involved in tending such a place. As a person, I’ve been craving connection in smaller places of art, and A Blue Farm offers that. It’s important these places are fostered for the project of people seeking relationship to one another, and seeking a deeper relationship to their work. Nick’s mission, I think, of highlighting the historical importance and gifts from the land in the work we make is an important approach to making sustainable, connective art. It’s a growing process, and what better place to grow than on the land that holds us?