Above Detail: Untitled Observations spacetime July 13 commencing 5:15am, 2006 spacetime 2006 Pigment Print on Cotton Rag, 24” x 60”
chance encounter
chance encounter
1: the unknown and unpredictable element that causes an event to result in a certain way rather than another, spoken of as a real force;
2: separate chains of events have their own casual determinants, but their intersection occurs fortuitously rather than through deliberate plan;
3: the surrealist doctrine of objective chance: the enforced juxtaposition of two completely alien realities that challenges an observer's preconditioned perception of reality.
Preserving Eccentricity
By Valerie Cotsalas
In the last year, Ms. Sandrow has been a fervent voice for preserving the house. She has created two exhibits of early photographs of Gissa Bu, now on display at the Southampton Historical Museum and at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Queens, and lobbied state and local groups to push the town to buy the house.
..the problem about the egg and the hen, which of them came first, was dragged into our talk, a difficult problem which gives investigators much trouble. And Sulla my comrade said that with a small problem, as with a tool, we were rocking loose a great and heavy one, that of the creation of the world.
Plutarch, Table Talk, Moralia 120 AD
The world is full of chance. In many cultures, the appearance of a white cockerel is interpreted as a sign of coming good fortune.
Chance Encounter, the Surrealist doctrine of objective chance, came to life for Hope Sandrow while walking in the Shinnecock Hills (March 29, 2006) once painted by William Merritt Chase, when her path crossed with that of a young white cockerel who followed her home. And thus began the relationship between Sandrow and the cockerel, she named Shinnecock after the hills where they met.
Unfolding in front of her still, video camera, and telescope was Sandrow’s new series, untitled observations spacetime, a study exploring the relationship of her body to the Sun, the Moon, planets, and stars - celestial bodies. It is also a meditation on time/space. Astronomical alignments; portend of things to come. Shinnecock’s appearance was a telling promise considering his symbolic and cultural significance to the Sun and the Moon. He was a Paduan aka Padovana (Italian) as was Galileo Galilei whose practice of camera obscura was Sandrow’s too at the time. (Note 1.)
One morning, inviting a new path, the cockerel, Shinnecock led Sandrow across the road onto an historic estate of recently felled trees. Standing out on this barren landscape was a unique Nordic Lodge called Gissa Bu (mystery house), designed to honor the Norwegian wife of aviation executive, Lamotte Turck Cohu by the Norwegian architect Thorbjorn Bassoe in 1930.
The lodge, a masterpiece of unique architectural features and murals of natural and mythological imagery only amplified the connections of the Chance Encounter. In a corner of one room was a larger-than-life-sized wooden carving of a rooster facing windows branded with the words “Hope’s Lokd Bar.” Looking East, motifs of a rising Sun and Moon, the Tree of Life with serpent and eagle inhabited a center stairwell, and the lodge’s windows were manufactured by the company, Hope’s Windows.
These ancestral lands were also the site of sacred burial grounds of the Shinnecock Tribal Nation, Sandrow’s neighbors, who had lived freely in these hills for 14,000 years until the town laid claim to it for their own Long Island Improvement Company. The resemblance of the cockerel’s feathered crest to the North American “Indian” Eastern Woodland headdress exemplified in Edward Curtis’s famous portraits and Shinnecock Tribal members in their regalia was another corresponding feature of the bird and the tribe. Neighbors.
His feathered crest brought to mind Edward S. Curtis’s series of portraits “The North American Indian." Snake Priest.
untitled observations march 28 2006 Shinnecock spacetime Pigment Print on Cotton Rag size variable
Eastern Woodland headdress regalia (pictured, Shinnecock Nation Performance Artist Shane Weeks).
Hónovi - Walpi Snake Priest, with Totókya Day Painting. Photograph: Edward Curtis
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Above: Untitled Observations spacetime April 16 commencing 615 PM Self Portrait spacetime
Mecox Inlet to the Atlantic Ocean, 2004 Pigment Print on Cotton Rag, 24” x 100”
Untitled Observations spacetime July 13 commencing 5:15am, 2006 spacetime 2006 Pigment Print on Cotton Rag, 24” x 60”
The property is “part of the shoulder of what people call Sugarloaf Hill,” a small high piece of land across Montauk Highway from the house, according to Elizabeth Thunder Bird Haile, a tribal elder. As far back as 1043 B.C., she said, “this is where the burials took place.”
— The New York Times, by Valerie Cotsas, March 4, 2007
Discovering that the lodge was slated for demolition, and when, Shinnecock Nation Tribal Elder, Elizabeth Haile, Princess Chi Chi called to ask for her help in preserving the land, Sandrow accepted her invitation. Bringing in environmentalists and preservationists to work in collaboration with The Shinnecock Tribal Nation, successfully resulting in ten acres of land preserved in perpetuity as part of the CPF (Community Preservation Fund).
Godt Tegn (Good fortune in Norwegian) is a part of the series Shinnecock, documenting the life and times of the white cockerel, Shinnecock who crossed the road.
At the invitation of the (now former) Director, Founder, and Chief Curator of PS1/MoMA Alanna Heiss, Sandrow created panoramic photographs exhibited in her project "Godt Tegn”(2006). In 2007 she was invited to create a solo exhibition by The Southampton History Museum - that had been the home of Samuel L. Parrish - that she titled (Re)collecting an American’s Dream. The American in question was Samuel Parrish who had also previously owned the Lamotte Cohu estate's land
Following this protracted preservation fight, and her Chance Encounter with the cockerel, Shinnecock, Hope created open air studio spacetime, a 24/7 home site for creating art in residence, as a response to a life lived in the macrocosm and microcosm of chance and the early influence of Duchamp’s aesthetic of chance.
A crowing rooster is “believed” to herald the “dawn” of a new day: their chance encounter was a pivotal moment in Sandrow’s life and, in her work. The role of chance became a central experience as it had been for the artist whose work first engaged Sandrow as a young girl. “I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.” Marcel Duchamp. LARGE GLASS was installed in 1952 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in a gallery that also included “Rotorelief (Optical disc)” prints. This is where Sandrow found her place in life engaged in the creative process. Making art, reflecting life, and the natural world — a prism through which to live.
“Duchamp delighted in the fact that the glass shattered while being transported, the jagged cracks further confounding and fragmenting the object's chance encounter with the real world. Rather than offering an escape into a story or environment, the environment is framed and focused by the work of art, and its story is ever subject to change, like the physical state of the artwork itself.” (Note 2)
Note 1: The young rooster, later named Shinnecock after the location where they met in the Shinnecock Hills, was a Paduan (English) aka Padovana (Italian) as was Galileo Galilei.
Note 2: “Looking at Dada” Authors Sarah Ganz Blythe, Edward D. Powers, Cassandra Heliczer, Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) · 2006 page 14