By KIM SMITH DEDAM
Staff Writer
It started in the sharp cold of January with snow shoveled onto banks off the sidewalk.
The Adirondack History Center Museum was closed for winter while curators preened and preserved aged things. The chilled air in exhibit halls was still, unstirred.
It was museum quiet then.
Finished displays were down, their artifacts detached. Holes needed patching on bare walls.
Glass cases in other rooms reflected the shifting patterns of morning light through the old school windows.
This was when the first stirrings of a new show began.
WHERE TO BEGIN?
History Center Archivist Jenifer Kuba was presented the task to build an art exhibit eight months ago.
It began with raw ingredients: sketches, paintings, sculpture, photographs.
Kuba traveled around the county, visiting the artists' works harbored in an office here, a town hall there, among fields and snowy furrows, sculptures poking up through ice in a farm pond.
At last, the Museum Board chose to highlight the work of Wadhams artist Edward "Ted" Cornell, whose contemporary sculpture is made from objects with a useful, if elapsed, history — rusted farm equipment, wheels, pipes and sunken implements.
He also has produced a significant body of realistic landscape paintings calling form from the fury of storms, tree bark, tangled grass and sullen hay bales left idle for a summer holiday.
And then there were Cornell's abstract paintings, a series called "Inertial Guidance" conceived from his father's engineering career designing Atlas missile guidance systems.
Where does the art show begin?
And why does a history center put art in the middle of its summer exhibits?
Kuba laughed that January day, staring out toward snow-laden peaks.
"This entire region is steeped in landscape painting history," she said. "Ted and I are constructing certain aspects of the exhibit as if we were writing history. It chronicles the sublime, these views of nature that take us away from the present."
Landscape painting dates to the very origins of the Adirondack Park, when Ralph Waldo Emerson came and wrote of long, deep thoughts drawn from nature and painters flocked to pull their color schemes from the play of mountain light.
"The idea of the park coincided with the style of landscape painting," Kuba said, naming the Hudson River School that shared its transcendental premise with the poets.
"So there's your original link between art and history. In the industrial centers of the early 19th century, people would see these landscape paintings. It was a kind of window into this ideal wilderness that humanity strives with such longing to delve into."
"It elevated people's expectation of what wilderness was before industry. I don't see how you can separate art from history."
ELEMENTAL CONCEPT
Cornell's wide array of artwork played into Kuba's hands.
"The first day I went to visit his farm, we talked about 'found' objects," she said.
Those items at Crooked Brook Studios are things farmers left on the land, just parked and never used again. Their recovery from the physical landscape — a perch on a farm hill, a corner of a brook — is as much a part of the art as the thing itself.
There is colloquial humor in the finished landscape sculptures Cornell calls "large, slow jokes."
But they couldn't be moved — well, most couldn't move, Kuba said.
"My reaction was to feel elated by all the ways his objects interpret local history," she said. "It was the key to placing art in a history setting."
The elemental concept of January slowly stirred into February.
"Ted and I meet about every week and discuss his works in relation to local history," Kuba said.
She didn't have a name for the show yet.
And there were many choices to make: how many rooms of the History Center would fit how many sculptures and which paintings.
She began to select pieces to build the show and moved them one by one to the museum.
They leaned idle for a while against the walls, as if in audition for the part.
Cornell's "Furious Trees," a dark, still, realistic work of a stand of pines caught in a windstorm, would play a central role in the show.
She took it from his living room wall.
"But unlike the Hudson River School, there's no easy way to get into the painting," Kuba said.
"I had to have it."
Then there was a question of order.
Kuba considered putting the realistic works before the historic found objects, in sequence through two exhibit rooms.
"Once they are all together, I will be able to see it," she said.
Back in the museum were ordinary things to do, getting the space ready for a new show. Old exhibition labels had to be pulled off; walls cleaned, labels written and printed.
A catalogue of Cornell's work had to be designed and produced.
There had to be a name for the show.
"Certain things pop into my head and then they leave," Kuba said in February, "which indicates they are not the right thing."
NEW PAINTINGS
By March, feeling a little drawn himself, Cornell said he didn't consider the art show a retrospective.
"I haven't been doing (art) long enough to have a retrospective. I started later."
The artist, whose studio is hidden on a loop of road between county routes 8 and 22 at the edge of Wadhams, moved to the Adirondacks 20 years ago after two decades working in New York City theater, much of that time with the legendary director Joe Papp and the early New York Shakespeare Festival.
Cornell agreed to do two new paintings for the exhibit, so there was also the silent urging of paint and brush.
Approaching the process of show-making, he leaned on experience as a theater director and method acting.
"Jenifer walked in and said, 'Yeah, we want to do this show,'" Cornell said. "She recognized all the things I make fit together somehow."
WIDENING THE PRESENT
By April, an exhibit name emerged: "Inside the Landscape." It arrived quietly, as an owl would, swooping swiftly in darkness through the trees.
Cornell said the title aptly referenced his sculpture and its connection to the history of found objects.
Sculptures Kuba borrowed for "Inside the Landscape" in many ways are resurrections.
"They are junk, something that already had a life," Cornell said. "They bring with them a past. Going 'inside' suggests the widening of the present; that somehow, by going deep into the past and bringing it forward, you widen your own present.
"And I think the show title speaks to the meditative quality of the paintings, too."
Cornell's realistic paintings pose an opposite if not genteel contradiction in the adjoining room.
"They are in pursuit of a very particular thing, the awe, the sublime," the artist said.
"All of my paintings are down inside it. I'm seeing the little pieces. The junk, that is what it is all made of."
THE ANGEL FLIES
It was terrifying, Cornell said, as the showpieces were slowly affixed to museum walls.
"The sense of exposure is immense; I feel like a rock in an open field. I look around and say, 'This is it? This is all? Everything I've done can fit into two rooms?'"
Cornell laughed.
By late May, it was time to move the largest piece of rusted objects.
The sculpture called "The Angel of Inerrancy Conveying Meaningful Souls to Hell," built on a 10-foot trampled rusty pipe, was literally raised by a log loader onto a flatbed truck and driven 12 miles from Wadhams to Elizabethtown.
It took all day — and four men from Jim Morse's construction company.
Kuba circled around the truck as it arrived to unload "The Angel."
Cornell was giggling like a child.
"She flies!" he said as the sculpture lowered to the front lawn of the History Center.
The museum opened at the end of May with Cornell's work firmly planted for the summer.
The rusted root of the show out front has drawn curious stares from passers-by and a few residents concerned about junk-yard appearances.
"What is art if it doesn't make people look?" Cornell said.
"The Angel" rocks on improvised hydraulics, creating an uneven "thud thunk" on the front walk.
A formal artist's reception for "Inside the Landscape" is scheduled for 5 p.m. July 31.
The art catalogue is due by mid-July.
"Naturally, I love it," Kuba said, sitting among objects arranged for the finished show. "When I consider why there is art in the History Center, I was working through a lot of answers to that question, seeing Ted as an artist. There is so much history behind everything he creates. You really get a good sense of what it means to be 'inside' a landscape. It feels like a million things."
E-mail Kim Smith Dedam at: kdedam@pressrepublican.com
