EJ Hill, Lesson #2 (2019), birch wood, acrylic, latex, mirrored acrylic, neon
“Different group shows have different origin points, this one has a double origin point,” says the curator Helen Molesworth, who has organised the show
Feedback (5 June-30 October 2021), at the New York dealer Jack Shainman’s upstate outpost The School, in Kinderhook. The exhibition takes its name from a 2004 work by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, which is included in the exhibition along with works by 22 other artists that play on the reverberations of personal memory and American mythology.
“I had the Cardiff/Miller piece
Feedback knocking around in the back of my head for years. It was like a pebble in my shoe,” Molesworth says. “When Jack asked if I wanted to do a show at The School I said sure, but I wanted to go see it first.” As its name implies, the satellite space is an early 20th-century high school, built on a five-acre lot in 1929, which the dealer converted into a year-round 30,000sq. ft gallery in 2013. “I went and I had what I describe as a kind of auditory hallucination. Walking into the building, I felt overwhelmed by the sound of kids. I remembered the din of my big public high school in Manhattan with 4,000 kids in the building, so between that and the Janet Cardiff piece, I knew there was a show, and I started working from there.”