Springs Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by American artists Donna Dennis and Tommy Hartung. Featuring my gouache paintings, photographs, and dioramas alongside a feature-length film and sculptural assemblage by Hartung, Night Traveling in the Early Country of the Imagination will bring to light a rich artistic conversation between the two of us, arising in response to our rural New York environs, to the source material of our childhoods, and to the bonds of a former teacher and student.
Drawing on the iconography of a family farm in Western New York, Tommy Hartung’s animated and physical landscapes engage deeply with the material histories that shape a place. Hartung’s feature-length animation, The Chautauqua County Almanac traces the evolutionary journey of lime plaster technology, from its origins in ancient Levantine mortuary customs to its modern applications in rural American farming. Inspired by Aldo Leopold’s seminal environmental work, A Sand County Almanac, the project unfolds against the backdrop of Hartung’s family’s grape farm in Chautauqua County, a rural area in western New York. The film represents the culmination of a six-year endeavor, incorporating outdoor time-lapse photography captured by trail cameras and three-dimensional landscape scans.
Hartung defamiliarizes his subject by combining agricultural data and local lore with handmade AI slop. The spliced, looping, glitchy narration is studded with repetitions and gaps, rendering an uncanny portrait of a place—like an apocryphal story or like a folk tale from an era of large language models. The spellbinding Almanac is accompanied by assemblages of artifacts that appear in the film.
Like Hartung, I'm attuned to the markers of memory and passing time—and to the correspondence between natural and supernatural elements. Like Hartung, I left New York City in 2019 after living downtown for fifty years. When I moved to the Hudson Valley, I turned from urban preoccupations—bridges, subway tunnels, and towers—to the rural structures around me, resonant with associations from my early life in Springfield, Ohio.
In this series of gouache paintings, photographs, and dioramas, I takes as my subject the view from the barn-like studio where I work. Within the frame, my own Shaker-style house sits off-center like a human figure on the landscape, silent witness to mysterious nighttime phenomena. Compared to my large architectural installations, the intimate scale of these pieces suggests the elemental work of beginning anew, of pursuing something elusive in darkness and solitude. The works reflect my reverence for the night, as a temporal expanse that sets the imagination loose like a traveler in search of ultimate things: beauty, survival, the self.