January 17 - March 9, 2002
Between 1988 and 2000, I wrote a series of short fiction stories about a small, rural town where the inhabitants were dying of a mysterious and terrible illness. I had grown up in the West Village, and I had been a teenager when AIDS started felling members of the local community. It had been the very beginning of an epidemic - the disease was nameless at first, its cause unknown.
By the time I started writing the stories, HIV had been identified and the whole world had changed; there were big sociopolitical issues around AIDS - and a complex rhetoric to go with them. So I wrote about an imaginary place and an imaginary illness. And the project became something new.
In writing about my imaginary plague, I made a couple of discoveries: I learned that the landscape was indifferent to human tragedy; I saw something terribly poignant about how, in a place of epidemic, an apple orchard may continue to flourish and bear fruit, not caring that its apples now drop to the ground and rot. I also realized that a disease itself is neither good nor bad. It may cause gruesome symptoms and pain and death, but it isn’t evil. It is just an organism perpetuating itself as best it can. Like us. What Happened in Lime Mills? takes these ideas into a new realm. This gives us space to think about illness without the politically charged, historically embedded, culturally specific aspects that a show about AIDS - or breast cancer, or Anthrax, or the Black Death - would necessarily have.
Only Barbara Reiser’s piece was created specifically for What Happened in Lime Mills? The rest of the work already existed, and I merely gathered it for this show. I did not choose these works because they illustrate my language, but because they use their own languages to articulate similar things. Featured artists in the exhibition include: Elizabeth Albert, Carola Dreidemie, Josh Dorman, Madelon Galland, Katurah Hutcheson, David Lantow, Hunju Park, Barbara Reiser, Joan Snyder, and Maggie Tobin.
One can extend the show’s metaphors to encompass any tragedy that befalls a community. The anguish of being trapped or of being barred from our homes, or suddenly becoming afraid of our neighbors, are feelings that we New Yorkers never expected to have. Neither was the awareness that so many could be swallowed up while the earth remains indifferent.
Nelly Reifler
Guest Curator