![]() Despite their differences in era and chosen mediums, Swanson and Cole are linked by a romanticist appreciation of the natural world, a propensity for the grandiose, and an exploration of the interplay between the formulaic and the distinctive. For the painter, as the label explained, this trunk speaks to the striking peculiarities of trees untouched by human settlers, who sought to control their growth so that there is less variation-a sentiment that likely resonated for Swanson with his interest in identifying queer images of, and situations in, nature. The works’ installation at the house-museum initiated a dialogue between Swanson and Cole: In one instance, a Swanson sculpture of three interlaced deer necks and heads evoked a knotty tree with three trunks in Cole’s painting Hunters in a Landscape (1824–25), which was also on display. Like Swanson’s artworks on display in North Adams, the items that queerly intervened in the quaint house-museum of Cole, founder of the Hudson River School and a noted environmentalist, included a busy collage involving tassels, two bejeweled deer, a vitrine filled with framed photographs, a lifeless bouquet, and electric candles. The latter two categories are more dynamically intertwined in a contemporaneous installation Swanson mounted at the home, studio, and yard of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, a 90-minute drive away in Catskill, New York. They combine the kitsch visual culture of post-Stonewall queer nightlife and domestic spaces with the aesthetic languages of 19th-century landscape painting. These melodramatic works make up Swanson’s most monumental exhibition to date. MASS MoCA Union Agrees to New Contract After 14 Months of Bargaining ![]() A few video works contributing additional natural imagery are embedded in the sculptures and reliefs. Assortments of photographs recur throughout the show, set in the kind of utilitarian metal frame found in any middle-class living room or positioned in rhinestone-studded wall mosaics they present generic scenes of nature (wintry waterfalls, moonlit skies, a ray of light bursting through a forest), historical snapshots of queer people partying, and some recognizable pop-cultural imagery such as Bruce Byron as the motorcycle hunk in Kenneth Anger’s film Scorpio Rising (1963). ![]() The works all riff on each other yet are unique, and seem curiously in a state of deterioration, despite the material excess. As if exploring a haunted house, viewers wander through the shadowy galleries, catching sight of a pietà featuring a Grim Reaper cradling a deer, a platform for a go-go dancer embellished with fabrics draped from branches, and a hanging, gently rotating chain clustered with shimmering antlers. Composed of plaster, wood, fabric, and prefabricated objects, the predominantly white sculptural works in Marc Swanson’s exhibition “A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco” draw on a limited lexicon of household items and architectural features-framed photographs, tables, stairs, drapes, mirrors, and lighting fixtures-juxtaposed with elements invoking nature and the outdoors, from deer dummies to branches, rocks, and icicles. At Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, two cavernous dim galleries are strewn with dozens of eerie assemblages that conjure a wonderland of death.
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