Beacon artist casts about for meaning
After moving from Brooklyn to Beacon in 2016, Elizabeth Mihaltse Lindy experienced crippling pain that shot down her legs, forcing her to stand on the train to New York City and back. Family issues and losses also hit hard and COVID-19 provided an additional test of fortitude.
Yet she finished her MFA at Lesley University in 2022 and, so far, post-surgery life has been mostly pain-free. But the experiences altered her artistic approach. Once primarily a fine-art painter, she will debut her newfound outlook at her first solo exhibition, An Offering of Gravity and Grace, which opens from 4 to 7 p.m. on Saturday (April 12) at Super Secret Projects in Beacon.
In Lindy’s work, which is infused with gravitas, symbolism and ritualism, she dips pliant sheets of mulberry paper in the Hudson River and wraps them around her body, especially her torso and legs, letting them dry for an hour or so, like a soft cast. People often compare the texture to cotton candy. She hangs the cocoon-like pods on the wall and photographs them in the wild, printing in black and white.
The show includes a video that documents part of the process-driven work and another that depicts a calming, mesmerizing scene of the undulating river. One sculpture on a pedestal features a 6-foot sheet of wet paper wrung free of water and crumpled into a clump that resembles a deformed baseball.
The installation “Silent Mourning” is a highlight that features four torsos stretched thin, as if to “reference absence through presence, or presence through absence,” she says. “I was a graphic designer [specializing in book covers], so it took a lot to share this work, much less put on a performance. Though raw, honest and unpolished, it’s almost a spiritual practice.”
As part of the exhibit, Lindy will demonstrate a portion of her procedure at Long Dock Park on April 20 and conduct a ceremonial wrapping — a solemn ritual performed in silence — at a closing reception at the gallery on May 4.
The works themselves look like old marble statues with folds. Sometimes the river water is dirty and shades of brown seep onto the white fabric, which Lindy takes as a token of the negative aspects of life that most everyone experiences, like loss, grief, regret and heartache.
“The river imbues a mood to the work,” she says. “It can be choppy and there’s also stone, sand, grass and dirt.” Many of the photos show the ghost-like paper sheets in shapes and poses along the riverbank. Lindy presents the fabric unfurling into the air (“An Offering of Grace”) or flat along the river’s edge (“Attachment” and “On Neutral Ground”).
Amplifying the somber mood, many of the works’ titles weigh heavy: “Processing,” “Mourning Ritual,” “And the Room Went Quiet.” In the photo “Shall We Gather by the River,” which is nearly identical to the title of a hymn written in 1864 that celebrates baptisms, half of a lower-body sculpture lies in the water.
Once, Lindy cast a form into the current as an act of letting go but it got stuck on a rock and returned to shore. Another time, “a woman asked me if it would harm the fish,” she says. “I told her, ‘I don’t know, but I’m not going after it.’”
Super Secret Projects, at 484 Main St., inside Hyperbole, is open daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. An Offering of Gravity and Grace continues through May 4. See supersecretprojects.com.
