Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Portia Munson and Jared Handelsman make art from their land, on their land and about their land, including a stupendous blueberry maze. More Photos »
IT is a sign of Jared Handelsman and Portia Munson's commitment to their art that he has had Lyme disease three times and she has had it twice. It is also a sign of how committed they are to their homestead, 83 acres of woodland and gardens here that include a stupendous blueberry maze. (Think "Spiral Jetty," but in blueberries.) On Heart's Content Road, it can be hard to tell where the art ends and the homestead begins.
Was that Mr. Handelsman's work in the woods, those snarls of brush against the tree trunks? Nope. They were left by the river last summer, after it flooded during Hurricane Irene.
But if you looked toward the hill near the graveyard, you might see a boulder as big as a baby elephant, strung up with a steel cable and tethered to an oak tree. Mr. Handelsman, whose early site-specific installations also recall Robert Smithson, is now devoted to photograms, using light-sensitive paper to capture the play of headlights on leaves.
He is a man who really throws himself into his work. He'll crouch in the underbrush close to the road and wait for cars to round the bend, then hold the paper aloft to snare the light, like a campaign worker with a placard. (It's a practice that has made him a magnet for ticks, among other wild things. On many a dark night, he has found himself ringed by coyotes howling to their comrades farther afield.)
Ms. Munson has been amassing pink and then green plastic objects (things like dolls, hair curlers and egg cartons), strewing them on tables or stuffing them into vitrines, since her inclusion in the New Museum's "Bad Girls" show in the early 1990s.
Lately, however, she has moved into blue plastic. Abutting an epically proportioned wood pile (stacked in a spiral, thanks to her husband) is a Windex-blue above-ground pool that will be the container for her next installation. Despite the heat, Ms. Munson's family gave the pool a wide berth all summer, disdaining it as an eyesore — her son, Zur, 18, suggested she drag it closer to the road and accessorize it with an old fridge or a broken-down sofa — but Ms. Munson has enjoyed floating in it while pondering the elements of her next piece. In the 21st century, she avers, plastic is just part of the nature that surrounds us.
She does work with plant life as well, though. This month, six of her ravishing flower mandalas — which she makes by gathering blossoms, bugs, even dead animals, whatever she finds in the garden on a single day, and arranging them in kaleidoscope patterns on a photo scanner — became a glowing windscreen at the Fort Hamilton Parkway Station on the D line in Brooklyn, part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's public art program. Made from pink hibiscus petals and squash blossoms, they look like trippy stained-glass windows.
This week, Mr. Handelsman is playing in New York City, too: His moody photograms are at the Fordham University Center Gallery at Lincoln Center, in a group show called "Rockslide Sky," which opened Wednesday.
The hub of all this activity is a compact 18th-century farmhouse that has been in Ms. Munson's family since the 1930s. Over the last two decades, it has been heartily embellished by Ms. Munson and Mr. Handelsman, both now 51, seemingly with a fierce mandate: horror vacui.
One bathroom is stapled with curling birch bark, Ms. Munson's solution, she said, "to being really broke and hating the tile." In the living room, the walls are papered with stencils of flowers that Ms. Munson made and then appliquéd with hundreds of giant pink pansies she had scanned from greeting cards and printed, like William Morris on a serious acid bender. And an armchair wears bright blue fake fur, like Cookie Monster. (The other day, Ms. Munson said: "A few years ago, I cleaned in here. I took a lot of stuff out. I wish I hadn't. Now it's really spare.")
Lunch on a recent Tuesday was similarly eye-popping, with red bud and lilac bushes tapping the glass on one side of a windowed porch, and woodland wallpaper, made from photographs of the trees by the river, on the walls. On the table, there was a whorl of salad greens and nasturtiums, zinnias in a blue bottle and yellow tomatoes in a yellow colander. Bunches of garlic hung overhead, delicate papery chandeliers.
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH 20 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/garden/jared-handelsman-and-portia-munson-make-their-own-museum-at-home.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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