'Metal Meadow', a Group Show at Camp Eternal Hell Chamber, Cobleskill, New York

Metal Meadow at Camp Eternal Hell Chamber is a group exhibition taking place at artist Brian Kokoska's upstate residence. Participating artists are invited to take over an emptied room inside the mid-1800s farmhouse in the small hamlet of Mineral Springs, Cobleskill, NY. Kokoska's solo exhibitions often invite other artists to present existing works within his own installations. Metal Meadow is a retrospective of artists who have presented works alongside him in previous collaborative environments, and shows he has curated. The exhibition includes additional invitees by Kokoska and Nathaniel Hitchcock, and is organized in collaboration with Elaine Levy of Levy.Delval, Brussels.

Metal Meadow is conceived as a group exhibition, a singular installation, and an immersive environment– intended to engage each of the participating artist's practices with the architecture of the farmhouse. Even as each artist is allotted separate areas within the building, the project positions itself as an encompassing environment by incorporating the building as a sculptural element–to be inhabited equally by both visitors and artworks. As an installation, it investigates archetypal tropes of the haunted house; a sentient architecture, brought to life and animated by supernatural elements. The presented works thematically engage with stillness, terror, memory and death, and the possibilities of emotional emergence facilitated by non-human objects and images.

The works' domestic siting provides a slight, uncanny shift in experience, as viewers are resituated as active inhabitants, disorienting their relationship to the artworks. Though, their agency is neutered by formal conventions of the exhibition, as they are disallowed from direct interaction with the works; roving around the space as disembodied, though all-seeing (perhaps like that of a camera pointed at its filmic subject). They assume the role of apparitions haunting the farmhouse; opening or closing doors, cabinets, pushing around domestic objects–a wine glass, a trash can–or attempting to turn the knob on a locked door. We can imagine these actions, from the perspective of the artworks, to be the performance of the house itself. The relationship reversal of the presented works and the visitors distorts the typical exhibition dynamic into one that features the tension of cohabitation without collaboration or negotiation, producing mutual observation with an unbridgeable and detached gaze.