Who doesn’t love a good corridor exhibition? If you’re not sure how to answer that, my suggestion is to go visit Guild Hall and take a stroll through its education corridor while “Carly Haffner: In the Woods” is still on view through this weekend.
As the museum’s main rooms are in between exhibitions, the curatorial staff has opted to keep this show going while it prepares for its members show, which opens on March 7.
Corridor exhibitions have been mounted from time to time over the years, but now have an annual spot on the museum’s roster and a mission to highlight “emerging artists living and working on the East End of Long Island.” With a location adjacent to the museum’s education department, the shows serve an additional purpose of inspiring programs geared to both adults and children.
Ms. Haffner is a natural for the space. As an early transplant to Springs, she grew up visiting the Pollock-Krasner House on both school trips and her own explorations and soaking up the light and history of a storied art colony. Her background also includes summer jobs at Larry Gagosian’s house, assisting David Salle, and the influence of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop in New York City.
As a graduate student at Hunter College, she made installation art that featured three-dimensional pieces. Yet the works she executed for walls were a big part of her overall presentation.
In this show, the two-dimensional works are dominant. They show much more restraint than was evident in her youthful exuberance and the early days of Bonac Tonic (a group of young East End artists who banded together to show their art and inspire community among artists who were struggling to stay here and do what they loved).
With her family having moved away and the group dormant lately, these recent paintings have a somber and scaled-back aesthetic. In them she shares with her twin brother, Grant Haffner, a stark take on a palette made up of the colors of the South Fork landscape, but her interpretation is totally her own.
Mr. Haffner’s paintings have traditionally focused on the lines and angles of the landscape, depicting roadways, telephone poles, and other natural and man-made elements in striations of sometimes intense saturated color. Conversely, Ms. Haffner’s paintings can be colorful but also muted, folky rather than Precisionist.
The natural linearity of trees is a recurrent motif, using both the actual branches and trunks along with the shadows they cast. Her moody acrylics on canvas capture not the summer culture of the 1-percent, but the life lived here 365 days a year. Paintings such as “Peter Shoveling the Snow,” “Psychedelic Forest,” “Love Bug and Jelly Bean,” and “Mullein Plant and Love Bug Camper” all feature a small camper set in the landscape. This is not the kind of scene conjured up by thoughts of “The Hamptons.”
At times she offers a sense of pathos, as with her paintings “Clouds Over Corwith Avenue,” “Pink Sky at Night,” “Red Sky in the Morning,” and “Burning Down the Childhood Home.” The latter two are especially foreboding. “Red Sky in the Morning” can mean a nasty storm is coming on land or at sea. Although the house burning down is metaphorical, it offers a sad and poignant allegory of the struggle to survive here as a working community member and the people lost along the way.
Painted almost entirely in the same format, a squarish 16 by 20 inches, the works seem as if they were designed with this display space in mind. This is not to imply any calculation on the artist’s part, rather that her format, content, and artistic style complement the setting in a serendipitously suitable way, one worth checking out, whether you’re there for a performance or as its own excuse for an outing during our last truly quiet time.
