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Recent bodies of work from Amy Podmore and Brigitta Váradi are pierced by crimson red. In the woods surrounding Peterborough, New Hampshire, these respective artists found formal and material inspiration during their respective residencies at MacDowell, the renowned artist colony. Though they participated at different moments, MacDowell allowed both to continue and sharpen their respective decades-long careful attention toward materiality: from the shiny to the dull and the natural to the artificial. For Re Institute, Podmore and Váradi present new and recent work with an eye toward the mythic textures of everyday experience.
Váradi is invested in the cultural heritage of the Rusyn people, a stateless and often unrecognized Slavic ethnic group Indigenous to the Carpathian Mountains. Drawing on the Rusyn lifeways practiced by her ancestors, Váradi staged a performance in a wintry landscape cloaked in a red Hunia– a woolen overcoat with both practical and ceremonial significance. Refracted through a camera, Váradi’s performance manipulates scale, symmetry, and palimpsestic layering as she wanders a snowy yet lush Northeastern landscape. Permission to be– HUNIA, highlights Rusyn resilience in the face of historic and ongoing violence, while also recalling a broader history of folkloric associations, from Little Red Riding Hood’s iconic cape to East Asian beliefs around the red string of fate that binds important human connections.
Váradi’s video performance shares sonic space with Podmore’s new moving image work, Fifteen Degrees, a poignant illustration of human fallibility. While at MacDowell, Podmore wandered those same Peterborough woods recording the creaking sounds made by trees leaning up against each other. The resulting work is a play of silhouette, two human forms– shadows from small vintage boxing thumb puppets—pushing, falling, and rising again in a scene of resilience underscored by an uncanny soundscape. Fifteen degrees is the extent to which a tree can lean before becoming dangerous; the title and sounds introduce a sense of risk and precarity. As Podmore records, amplifies, and manipulates the ASMR-inducing noises of tree trunks rubbing against each other in the wind, these sonic textures infiltrate and inflect Váradi’s own wandering, where trees serve as witness.
