Susan Mikula: Island

A show of photographs at the Brattleboro (VT) Museum, 10/26/24-2/9/25, curated by Yrs Trly

The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, has four shows opening this coming Saturday, October 26. One of the exhibits is ISLAND, a series of photographs of the area of Bellows Falls where my studio is located, by my longtime friend, Susan Mikula. The Brattleboro Museum is located in the former railroad station there, and ISLAND is in the Ticket Gallery, the area of the old ticket offices. It is a perfect setting. I was fortunate enough to serve as curator of the show. If you are around - stop by; we will be there from five to seven. We will also be doing an artist’s and curator’s talk on Tuesday, November 19. The Brattleboro Museum is an extraordinary small art museum, somewhat unique in that it has no permanent collection; instead, each show is unique and unrepeated.

Here’s all sorts of info about the exhibit.

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ARTIST’S STATEMENT:

It was late fall when I met ISLAND. Days short now, the light heavily angled and sucker-punch beautiful. Pale gray sky, trees mostly bare with just small swaths of golden leaves hanging on, turning in the lifting wind. Chilly but not New England cold, you know—still warm enough to use the cameras.  

Driving up from Massachusetts, a straight shot north on 91 or a little meander on Route 5 if you want to see Santa’s Land up by Putney, which I almost always do, you can get to Bellows Falls pretty quick. ISLAND is just over the canal; ISLAND is Elnu Abenaki—special, sacred, ceremonial. ISLAND is Bridge Street, Island Street, Depot Street. ISLAND is a built environment athwart the monumental natural.

ISLAND’s easy beauty is in the existing vernacular structures of power company, gas station, warehouse, factory, and railroad; the best child’s playset ever. The lovely mystery of ISLAND is what is barely visible and indistinctly whispered—what comes at you from the deep quiet of rock and the loud expanse of water. 

I walked and slid over ISLAND from November to June, in weather mostly drab but occasionally glorious, cajoling my old cameras and finicky out-dated film to create what I already knew was there: the fine particularity of a place outside of time.

I use Polaroid cameras. For this work, I carried mostly SX-70 Land Camera Alpha 1s in chrome. Classic. And one very mod SX-70 Model 2, SE. Maybe originally retailed out of Sears, that one is ivory plastic with brown skins.  

I love these old mechanisms. Each is wholly unlike the others, and I adore their mischievous natures. But they are sensitive to cold, as is the chemistry of the films, and I would often have to keep them swaddled in woolens, taking out one camera at a time, two shots, maybe three then back into the snug, dry warmth of the basket. The shot film was sensitive too—on very cold days I would slide the pictures next to my skin to keep them warm enough to develop.

ISLAND is almost too much to take in. Too much to see, too much to translate, too much evidence. It was time and recognition that gave me a way in and allowed place and structure to push forth. There is always granting and acceptance to be found in close study. And ISLAND graciously asked me in.

— Susan Mikula

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CURATOR’S STATEMENT:

In the hands of a master musician, distortion is a tool to be celebrated, manipulated, painted with. A great guitarist knows exactly what shade of evil noise best conveys what they want us to feel. The seemingly random squallings of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” are actually anything but.

So it is with the photography of Susan Mikula, who uses old Polaroid cameras and expired instant film to produce her haunted and haunting work. But which film to pair with which camera, which lens, what time of day, what light? Years of observation and experimentation have honed her approach in ways that are authoritative and authentic. With ISLAND, Mikula drops the viewer into the realm of dream; the vertiginous displacement we feel is not accidental.

What we are seeing is the unforgiving 30-acre shelf of granitic bedrock that forces the Connecticut River to make an abrupt eastward hitch in Bellows Falls, halfway down the river’s 400-mile journey from source to sea. But we see it through Mikula’s eyes, the way she wants us to see it, veiled in the distortion of her choosing.

Her vision, simultaneously rooted in but also floating above the land, is a perfect fit for the Island. Long the industrial heart of Bellows Falls, the Island was first the gathering, ceremonial, and burial place for Abenaki and Iroquois people. The Island itself has been defined by human manipulation for centuries. 

Originally firmly attached to the mainland, this bit of peninsula became surrounded by water when the Bellows Falls Canal, chartered to circumnavigate the falls, blasted its way through the bedrock at the turn of the 19th century. The first bridge on the Connecticut River had already been built in Bellows Falls in 1785, and the railroad arrived in 1849, binding the land in Lilliputian servitude to the engine of American commerce. Resort hotels, farm machinery, armament manufacturers, paper mills, and busy roadways all came and went. Now quiet reigns, as the palimpsest that is the Island awaits its next chapter.

Mikula has a painter’s eye, and any journalistic conventions of photography largely fall away as she homes in on her compositions. Artists Franz Kline and Stuart Shils are as much a part of Mikula’s approach as photographers Dorothea Lange or Henri Cartier-Bresson. Over a career of more than 30 years, Mikula has gone on a singular journey with a unique instrument. To immerse ourselves in ISLAND is to immerse ourselves in that journey, in that place, guided by a master.

— Charlie Hunter