Danziger at the Tremaine

by Penny Michels

No one can drive from New York City to the Berkshires without a shivering glimpse of the long-abandoned Harlem Valley/Wingdale Psychiatric Center. The buildings, a group of Chernobyl-like ghost buildings, sit along New York’s Route 22, quietly deteriorating landmarks in total shutdown. Vandals and graffiti artists have come and gone; but what has happened inside?

The Judicious Palette of Time, a startling and enlightening exhibit of photographs by Avery Danziger at the Tremaine Gallery, Hotchkiss School, invites you to enter this curious world. These photographs serve as testimony to the marriage of art and science and the paradoxical beauty of decay. There is madness here.

The photographs at the Tremaine are huge and haunting. You can physically walk up to the old soda fountain, an ironic social gathering place for asylum inmates. The windows of the gallery have been mysteriously “replaced” with the rusted bars and broken glass from the abandoned hospital. Minute details fight for attention with broad fields of color and texture and light.

Danziger worked through years of red tape to obtain permission to take his camera inside the hospital. He found totally toxic interiors within the walls of the entire complex. To quote Danziger, “The air is filled with toxic mold (from long standing water), and asbestos and lead paint cover the floors”…. “This is really ‘Art That Can Kill’... And yet I love the stillness and quiet of the place. All I can hear is my breath through the respirator and HazMat suit I have to wear, much like a diver undersea.... In addition, the absolute lack of my seeing anything living (except an occasional fern or moss trying to eek out an existence) continues the metaphor of a diver visiting a bleached and dying coral reef.”

The Harlem Valley/Wingdale Psychiatric Hospital is a vast property of 80 buildings on 850 rolling acres. It first opened in 1924 as a “progressive alternative” to the treatment (incarceration) of the mentally ill. At its peak, in the mid-1950s, there were more than 5,000 patients and 5,000 employees. There was an ice cream shop, whose round swivel stools come straight from a Norman Rockwell illustration; a stage; a baseball field and grandstand; and other components of a self-sufficient community, including a bakery, one of the biggest dairy farms in the county, and a bowling alley.

Avery Danziger and the Tremaine Gallery, have created an unusual and challenging exhibit. Meet the artist at the reception , Saturday, May 25 from 4-6pm. “The Judicious Palette of Time” runs through June 16, 2013.

<a href=" http://www.hotchkiss.org/abouthotchkiss/tremaine-gallery/index.aspx/ " target="_new">www.hotchkiss.org/abouthotchkiss/tremaine