Artist Statement:

Winter in the Summer House replaces Frederic Church’s lost summer house with a radical reimagining of what was once there. The new walk-in hexagonal structure is constructed entirely of framed engraved mirrors on the site of the former summer house. The project literally inverts the traditional gazebo, where the viewer looks out onto the landscape, by having the structure itself collect and reflect the view, inserting it into a salon-style installation of gold frames reminiscent of Church’s own collection. This conversion of the view into a collection of “paintings” is intended to highlight Olana as a landscape that is also an artwork. It also underlines the fact that today, Olana is publicly owned – the view now belongs to us all and we all have to work to protect it.

When visitors enter the house, the sunlight coming through the engravings creates a composite drawing in light of an invented glacial landscape of the type that climate change is rendering increasingly rare. Careful viewers will see parts of Church’s paintings (The Icebergs, 1861 and Aurora Borealis, 1865) in the engravings as well as a heap of discarded wordless protest signs. The interior engraving is intended both as a tribute to Church’s environmental legacy and his famous 1859 journey to Newfoundland and Labrador in search of icebergs to paint, and a call to action.

Preliminary artist mockups, Winter in the Summer House, exterior (top) and interior (bottom). Courtesy Ellen Harvey.

Detail of “Plan of Olana,” 1886, indicating placement of the “Summer House” in the vicinity of the Main House and Stable. New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Olana State Historic Site, OL.1984.39.

Ellen Harvey is a British-born conceptual artist whose work ranges from guerrilla street interventions like her iconic New York Beautification Project for which she painted miniature landscapes over New York’s graffiti sites to immersive institutional installations and large-scale public artworks. Her work is painting-based but utilizes a wide variety of media and participatory strategies to explore several reoccurring themes such as the social and ecological implications of the picturesque, the revolutionary potential of nostalgia, the conflict between advertising and ornament in public space, the relationship between art and tourism and the role of art and the artist in our society. Her work is represented in numerous institutional collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Bass Museum of Art (Miami Beach), SMAK (Ghent, Belgium), Berkeley Museum of Art, Bunker Art Space (Palm Beach), Clay Center for the Arts & Sciences (West Virginia), Art Omi, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Princeton Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Gwangju Art Museum (Korea), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea (Santiago de Compostela, Spain) and the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), among others. Ellen lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Locks Gallery (Philadelphia) and Meessen Gallery (Brussels, Belgium).

Artist Statement:

A Measure of Comfort (Cake and Cord) is a pair of interrelated sculptures installed on the former woodshed and icehouse foundations in the Olana landscape. Historically, ice from Olana’s lake was cut and stored in the icehouse in blocks, or “cakes” for refrigeration, while wood cut from trees on the property was burned for heat. A Measure of Comfort reflects on these bygone methods of harvesting natural resources—wood and ice—for human comfort, while pointing to the challenge of maintaining control over temperature, and the peril to the environment in doing so. Today we rely on more advanced technologies to heat and cool, and yet more than half of the energy used in homes still goes into heating and cooling. As climate change intensifies extreme weather events, the pursuit of “comfort” (livable temperatures and conditions) is increasingly urgent, necessitating continued evolution in our technologies, but also a reassessment of our relationship with temperature. A Measure of Comfort explores this evolving relationship between people, nature, and climate systems.

On the site of the former woodshed, beams of Southern yellow pine—remnants recycled from a previous project—are arranged vertically to form an uneven floor, or landscape. The volume of wood equals approximately one cord (128 cubic feet), referencing traditional units of measurement for firewood. Charred into the surface is the pattern of a decorative heating grill from Olana’s Historic House. This process created biochar, referencing former agricultural uses of the land, and suggesting one of the many ways forward towards a less carbon-intensive future.

Contiguous with the history of managing the woods and planting trees at Olana is a record of ice harvesting on the lake, which in Church’s time used to freeze over regularly. The sculpture at the icehouse site reimagines a typical 19th-century ice “cake” through a series of reflective stainless steel water containers, descending in size. These containers will hold rainwater, naturally filling and evaporating over time. A mirrored stainless-steel design, inspired by both the Hudson River watershed and rivulet patterns formed by melting ice, overlays the surface—invoking nature’s cycles and scales.

Together, the components of A Measure of Comfort (Cake and Cord) are an homage to historical and ongoing extractions of natural resources to satisfy human comfort. They call attention to the environmental ramifications of heating and cooling, and—as we see how our needs impact both the landscape and our shared world—urge us to consider how we might redesign systems and reevaluate our essential needs towards a more integrated homeostasis.