Forty artists from around the world have a lot to show local residents about Western New York at the Medina Triennial, a free village-wide art exhibition running noon to 6 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays until Sept. 7.
The event’s art installations, videos, and performances distill the essence of upstate New York that many of us no longer notice, and re-present it in cunning and powerful ways. The result is both discovery and a sense of connection as the everyday fabric of our communities is celebrated by outside ambassadors.
Organizers meant for that to happen. As they expressed in the event’s guidebook, the Triennial “was founded on the conviction that ambitious contemporary art can have a meaningful impact outside major metropolitan centers — and that smaller towns offer a distinct perspective.”
The Village of Medina is also on display, chosen for both its everyday circumstances and its symbolism as an artifact of the Erie Canal. Shirley Verrico, operations manager for the Triennial, said the exhibition was initiated by the New York Power Authority Canal Corporation after working on canal maintenance in Medina. The variety of buildings available to use for the exhibition — from a theater on Main Street, to the former high school, and the new canalside Triennial Hub at 345 N. Main St. — helped the Canal Corporation choose the village.
“The work is not just in Medina,” Verrico said, “it’s of Medina.” Most of the art featured was created after artists visited and researched the community. These artists chose different entry points, but it’s all about Medina,” she said.
Medina was also chosen because the historic integrity of the village was preserved, Verrico said.
“It feels outside of time,” she said of the village. “That feels quite captivating. A lot of people who were here this weekend had not been to Medina.”
Exhibition artistic directors Karin Laansoo and Kari Conte explained that the exhibition’s theme, “All That Sustains Us,” explores the question “What does it take to keep things going?” The question led artists to explore agriculture, maintenance, local economies, and natural resources.
For artists thinking about materials to work with, Medina sandstone emerged as a favorite. But plants, water, everyday objects, coal, and even beaver-chewed logs emerged to have powerful abilities to express ideas.
In her exhibit “How to Carve a Sculpture,” Japanese artist Aki Inomata experimented with whether only humans can make art. Over five years, Inomata provided wood to zoo beavers, and then tried to replicate their artistry by hand and machine carving her own gnawings. While beavers live among us in Western New York, Inomata’s experiments are a revelation into the rodents’ rarely seen body of work.
The big, beautiful barge docked just off Medina’s Main Street on the Erie Canal combined nearly all of the Triennial’s themes into a project that involved the public in its creation. Artist Mary Mattingly of Maine created “Floating Garden” to treat the waterway as a civic infrastructure with new possibilities. Having invited school children to start seeds and gardeners to bring greenery, Mattingly planted a 30-by-80-foot industrial barge with pear trees, herbs, lettuce, tomatoes, and flowers supported by a biochar-based water filtration system. For visitors, it’s a chance to board a barge that was once a part of doing business in canal country, and to think about how ecosystems function.
Barcelona-born Selva Aparicio, an artist based in Alfred, was inspired by 100-year-old brooms found at the Medina Railroad Museum. In recognition of the lives and labor tied to the brooms, and the shipments of coal that came through the railyard, Aparicio created “Maintenance,” a gleaming, metallic broom carved from anthracite coal.
“That’s a material that is nearly impossible to work with,” Laansoo said. “It resists carving.”
That the sculpture is housed in an ordinary weathered shed next to the museum is just another unexpected feature of the Triennial.
Free weekly tours and workshops will add to visitors’ experience of the exhibition.
On Sunday, visitors can participate in a guided tour at the Sacred Heart Church at 208 Ann St. at 1 p.m. At 2 p.m., young kids can participate in a free art workshop at the Triennial Hub. At 3 p.m. at the Triennial Hub, youths 11 to 18 can get involved in a workshop to explore the Orchestra of Human Voices exhibit.