42 Social Club is pleased to announce our first outdoor sculpture installation! Using the natural forest landscape David Howe will create a fantastical tent field, washing the secluded Lyme woods in red nylon tents. In this era of civic/economical turmoil the work elicits ideas of political refugees while harkening back to Connecticuts own colonial past, highlighting in red our own history of displacement.
Please join us for the opening reception Sunday September 1, 12-2pm.
David Howe’s Tent Field project began as an effort to conjure a physical artwork from a descriptive passage found in Albert Camus’ The Plague. The project now numbers over 100 red rip-stop nylon tents, varying in scale but all considerably less than life-size. River stones placed inside secure them, while careful observation reveals that they are fully enclosed, without entrances or exits.
In cultures with an immersive connection to their natural surroundings, tents and tent-like structures provide moveable shelter and temporary grounding. In societies defined by buildings and housing, tents have long sheltered the unwanted, the unwashed, the forlorn, refugees, the diseased, the wounded, the captured, the homeless.
Tent Field: Contested Territory, 2019, is an installation designed specifically for the 42 Social Club location in Lyme, Connecticut. On this site embedded with the histories of the Pequot tribal people and the arrival of the English colonists, the tents populate the woods and act as mute interrogators of the invisible histories of the land. The ground becomes content.