Gungywamp
42 Social Club
42 Gungy Road,
Lyme, CT.
curated by Kari Adelaide and Max Razdow (The Sphinx Northeast)

Nov 3rd – Dec 15th
OPENING RECEPTION – Nov 3rd, 2pm – 4pm
or By Appointment

Kirsten Deirup
Alesandro Keegan
Karsten Krejcarek
Paola Oxoa

Gungywamp celebrates an instantiation of spirit in place and location, taking its name and inspiration from a nearby mystery site of natural and man-made stone structures: Gungywamp, in Groton, CT. Psychogeography, a term coined by Guy Debord to illustrate the human tendency to gather emotion from sites in the world, provides a welcome footing from which to inspect this territory. In gathering four artists who may herald its structures or engage in different ways, we hope to explore an architectural presence as well as the hidden edifices of a landscape. This show, in addition to being an honorific tribute to a site inhabited by several cultures through the vagaries of time, aims to explore the manner in which the artist can summon a spiritual energy into location. These echoes may be traced by physical traits as well as lingering memory images, perhaps traversing unseen borders like tulpas from the fog.

Gungywamp’s most weird feature might be its “Cliff of Tears”, an overhanging rock structure claimed by some to create overwhelming emotion in passersby. Like a baleful version of Sedona’s vortexes, its gray mass leers from romantic tangles of southern New England woods, and has caused wild speculation about nearby petroglyphs’ ties to far flung cultures like the Egyptians and Celts. Ezra Haber Glenn notes that while real geographic constituents articulate human desires, its mediums of understanding include things as diverse as “travelogues, real and invented biographies, opium-induced confessions, playful and surreal works of art, and other literary, poetic, and geographical flights of fanciful reality (and realistic fantasy)” (1). Gungywamp’s story emanates not solely from the physical places that engender its presence, but just as strongly in the murmurs and smoky breaths of the wanderers in its groves.

1: Ezra Haber Glenn. (2017). Wanderings in Psychogeography: Exploring Landscapes of History, Biography, Memory, Culture, Nature, Poetry, Surreality, Fantasy, and Madness [Syllabus]. Cambridge, Massachussetts: Department of Urban Studies and Planning MIT. PDF.