Amelia Bauer, images from The Wintering
artist info at ameliabauer.com
From the artist:
THE WINTERING
In 2014, I left New York City after nearly two decades there for a secluded home in Central New York, a region with a rich history of enthusiastic and occult religion. Route 20 – which passed just north of this new home – functioned in the 19th century as one of the main passages for Americans flowing westward, and was termed The Psychic Highway; the swath of land surrounding it was known as the Burned-Over District, so named because of the religious fervor that roiled the people of this area. The area became a staging ground for America’s earliest forays into alternative religious ideas and a thoroughfare for the occult. Spiritualism, Mormonism, Christian Science, and a slew of other precursors to the “New Age” sprung from this region and set the stage for what would become a quintessentially American attitude of self-invention, self-help, and self-realization. After spending the coldest winter on record in my secluded home, I began a series of work utilizing a vocabulary of traditional American crafts and a whimsical approach to create costumed self-portraits and ritualistic objects as means of exploring these interior and exterior landscapes in the spirit of those who inhabited this region before me.
