An ambitious show at Sky High Farm stages beauty and despair in a backdrop of ecological uncertainty
This eco-themed exhibition of over 50 international artists, installed on two floors of a decommissioned cold storage warehouse in Upstate New York, is dedicated to raising funds for the Dan Colen-founded regenerative farm Sky High Farm (SHF). One first notices the laissez-faire assortment of pruned and festooned vegetation, including the shorn limb of a weeping mulberry to which Stephen Lichty has attached delicate silver chains; Pia Camil’s forked tree branch adorned with empty soda bottles; Michael Sailstorfer’s kinetic sculpture composed of an inverted bough sweeping the floor inside a ring of leaves; and several lemon and orange saplings growing in an indoor orchard, designed by Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison. It makes sense that the sprawling inventory of plants – many of which are reflected and proliferate in Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled (2004), an installation of mirrors that fills the venue’s second floor – would take centre stage in a show titled TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END (a phrase purportedly uttered by the late artist and SHF cofounder Joey Piecuch when he was a toddler). Relegated to the background, then, is the notion of human settlement and expansion found in the second part of the title.
Because the show inaugurates what the exhibition materials call ‘a new chapter’ for the nonprofit – namely, their own expansion onto a 225-hectare property in Ancram, New York – it seems intent on striking a celebratory and politically neutral tone, which its curator (Colen) maintains, for the most part, rather nimbly through a series of visual patterns and variations. Inside Anne Imhof’s Untitled (Germantown, NY) (2025), a labyrinthine installation of industrial water tanks that fills the first floor and doubles as wall space for other works, one finds three broad themes – sublimity, alienation and revelry – braided in a corridor dedicated to largescale photographs. About a third of the passageway is devoted to images like Luke Fischbeck’s aerial views of rivers and Andrew Moore’s Trap Cliff, Barrytown (2023), which depicts a distant locomotive passing beneath colossal ochre-edged clouds and a misty mountain range. Others resemble Optics Division’s Hoosic: The Beyond Place 1 (2016–17), a black-and-white photo of a gloomy, abandoned-looking edifice – the Robert W. Wilson Building at MASS MoCA – that the artists deliberately muddled with water during the printing process, and Ryan McGinley’s photos of lean, naked young men facing off with fires and waterfalls.
What’s implied is an anthropocentric and, frankly, sentimental message, that the natural world and the built world are, for better or worse, pathos-laden backdrops for modern humans’ reckless endeavours. Elsewhere, Tränen (2015), a video by Michael Sailstorfer of a house being destroyed by wrecking ball-sized teardrops, establishes a lacrimae motif that is reprised in Anne Collier’s Lichtenstein-esque Woman Crying (Comic) #24 (2020), a blown-up image of a cartoon eye shedding a single white tear. The eye weeps above eight sculptures by Paulo Nazareth made from natural materials like stone and wood, while a gasping vocalist singing about annihilation in SALEM’s 2020 song DieWithMe plays into the exhibition space on a loop. These traces of mourning, which worm their way through the exhibition’s celebratory veneer, point to the increasingly prevalent and all-too-human phenomenon of climate grief, exacerbated by the contradiction inherent in the show’s title. Endless houses – a symptom of human expansion and development – still, at present, foreclose the possibility of endless trees, as wildernesses continue to be deforested and degraded to accommodate our needs, despite the remediation efforts of regenerative farms like SHF. The exhibition seems less interested in faulting anyone for this impasse than in sympathetically recording how it feels to be human at this juncture of grandeur and despair.
TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END at Sky High Farm, Germantown, New York, through 31 October
