If there’s any building on the West Side that is deserving of redevelopment, it’s got to be the Agway building – the circa 1890 Curtiss Malting building. In order to help draw attention to this architecturally significant beauty, its owner tossed a set of keys to two local artists – Sarah Myers and Anna Scime – with the intention of cleaning out the loads of debris. Sarah had been looking for a vaulting space of this nature to display her oversized works of art and recalled being in the building years before. At one point gallerist Nina Freudenheim ran a gallery in the back of the building, but for the most part there have been no significant developments other than the demolition of a failing superfluous structure.
“It’s the perfect building for an art exhibit of this nature,” Sarah (inset) told me. “After cleaning out ten giant dumpsters, with the help of twenty friends, we were able to move in a number of 3-4 ton boulders that we positioned in the center of the room. The boulders help to anchor the exhibit – Nature & Decay. It took hundreds of hours to remove all of the widow hangers from the building. We added a ramp to make it easier for people to walk in. This was the first malting facility in the nation to have electricity, so we feel that people will want to come for the architecture and the art.”
The composition of the show is what led Sarah and Anna to the building. Sarah’s bent on drawing and painting trees, a number of which hang in some of the most prominent art institutions in Buffalo, lent perfectly to the raw space, which could easily house her 8-10′ tall paintings, as well as Anna’s film installation in the back boiler room. The symbolism of nature in a never ending spiral of growth and decay is not only represented in the works of art, but the building itself.
Sarah first began painting trees over a decade ago when she lived in Brooklyn. “There was a ginkgo tree outside of my window,” she said. “I would paint it every season, but I could never capture it. So I left the backgrounds white to emphasize the ever-changing surroundings. In ways, the singular tree represented isolation for the tree, or for you, or me. The tree is affected by its background.
“I am interested in capturing the interconnected of the natural world – how everything is connected. Even a tiny mushroom omits a signal into the ground that helps the soil around it to be fertile. We are connected to everything – the trees, and this building, which is in a state of decay within our own city. Eventually I got bored of the white backgrounds, and began to paint colors that had an abstract sense that something else was going on. I do not consider myself an environmentalist, but I do speak messages through my artwork.”
“Like fingerprints, no two spore prints are exactly alike,” said Anna. “Along with color, smell and other physical markers, they’re used as a testing mechanism for field identification. Hundreds of individual mushroom spore prints make up each film (and billions of spores comprise each film frame) – each with their own unique shape and coloring. During projection kinetic forces disperse the spores – accentuating and de-saturating the films’ colors and sounds. The films in the series feature different audiovisual movements provided by different mushroom species. At the Agway, shaggy mane, bella, chanterelle, and oyster spores will fill the room.”
On Saturday, June 11, 2016, from 4 PM to 10 PM, come join Sarah and Anna for a show that will première a series of Sarah’s large-scale tree paintings, along with new films from Anna’s ongoing Spore Print Films Series (16mm film, 2010-present) – “a study of organic, modern and contemporary technologies that explores cycles of creation, destruction and archival permanence.”
Exhibition Preview: 6/9/16 4-10pm
Opening Reception: 6/11/16 4 -10pm
Closing Reception: 8/20/16 4-10pm
Beer from Community Beer Works (CBW), entertainment, in an inspirational reclaimed space.
The Agway Building | 1100 Niagara Street | Buffalo, NY 14213