Photo by Andrew Schwartz.
Contributed by Patrick Neal / As we orbit Winter Solstice, marking the shortest days, longest nights, and coldest temperatures of the year, along comes the perfectly timed exhibition, “Night Traveling in the Early Country of the Imagination” at Springs Projects in Dumbo. The show, which presents the work of multimedia artists Donna Dennis and Tommy Hartung, is dark, atmospheric, and hauntingly beautiful, evoking the season’s long shadows, monochrome palette, and stark beauty. It also embodies a mentor-mentee relationship – Dennis was Hartung’s teacher at SUNY Purchase – and enlists digital technology and low-tech craft. The two artists complement each other, drawing on a variety of sources including the lore and natural phenomena of their wild upstate surroundings and childhood memories. The gallery is darkened, filtering works on paper, found objects, wall reliefs, and projected images visible though dim ambient light.
Hartung’s feature-length film The Chautauqua County Almanac has a flickering, frenetic quality. Black-and-white images derived from outdoor time-lapsed photography, trail cameras, and 3D scans, often stained with primary colors in kaleidoscopic and stroboscopic overlays, are accompanied by a voice-over relating the ancient history of lime plaster production to modern farming technology. Facts, folklore, and local history intermingle as the film teeters between natural and robotic storytelling, absorption, and repetition. It’s easy to get lost in the narrative shifts and rapid-fire splicing, and particular segments can be disorienting and hallucinatory. A sequence involving a pair of hands submerged in water and soil conjures physical labor and ancestral family trees, phalanxes of spry elderly hands resembling branches and bones. The film has some of the layered historicism and psychedelic razzmatazz of artist Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Trilogy, which layers American history and painterly, dream-addled recollections.
Deer, fish, frogs, coyotes, hawks, and crows make appearances. In one segment detailing the addictive and toxic effects of organic and manmade chemicals, a toad morphs into a moth, resplendent in red and green pigments. In another, howls and squeals accompany the yodeling dirge of Pete Seeger’s Coyote, My Little Brother, as we traverse a crimson landscape shimmering with starlight, glitter, and tinsel. Passages like these suggest filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, which also explores time travel and loops of disequilibrium. Props scattered about the gallery emerge from the darkness or lie clustered on tables pin-lit from above. Walking sticks, animal skins, straw, rocks, figurines, roots, and nettles all show up, and a bomber jacket – presumably Hartung’s – rests on the floor like an avatar or perhaps a scarecrow. Other physical artifacts, like hand-tinted inkjet prints and mixed-media storyboards, modulate the film’s dingy earthiness and textured collage aesthetic.
Where Hartung catapults viewers with commanding narration, Dennis’ calm and quiet work offers them a rest, suggesting the meditative stillness of a Japanese Noh performance. With slight variations and adjustments to the subject of a simple house in a landscape, she uncovers a surprising range of possibilities latent in dark woods and night sky. In a series of gouache and watercolor paintings, she captures the Shaker-style house and surrounding grounds outside her studio window. As she zooms in and out and moves left and right, the day turns to dusk then night. The house, often situated far right, acts as an anchor, materializing through black and indigo evenings or ensconced in sunlit grass and trees. Paintings in the rear of the gallery add a fantastical dimension to the basic tableau. The sky descends, the house flips upside-down, and a moon and fireflies envelop the scene as shooting stars, a gossamer moth, and silver scaffolding approach.
The small paintings could be studies for six box-like dioramas centrally mounted to the gallery walls. These possess the same poetic quietude as the paintings and, in replicating an actual site, demonstrate the power of transcription as a transcendent device. Modestly populated with real and imaginary subjects, they depict gnarly twigs, gem-like stars, and houses that tilt and fly through the sky as if in a nocturnal dance. Miniature models of trees are dotted with bullseye targets, their concentric circles mimicking celestial constellations. Diorama #2, with long strands of twine dangling among branches and secured by crystal orbs, could be a sister piece to ON SITE: In Time, a 2023 installation by Kristin Jones at the ICEHOUSE Project Space in Sharon, Connecticut. Jones’s installation included elastic ribbons that likewise descended from tree branches and crossed paths with magnifying lenses and a crystal ball. Accompanying it was the sentiment that “we are infinitesimal mortal beings in an infinite universe,” which aligns nicely with Dennis’s work.
Photo by Andrew Schwartz.
Photo by Andrew Schwartz.
Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
The rich collaborative affinities between Dennis and Hartung are conducive to probing contemplation, which the dark ambiance of Springs Projects further encourages. The non-linear, transportive quality of their work brings out the profound connections we develop to ordinary places in our own backyards and backstories.
“Donna Dennis & Tommy Hartung: Night Traveling in the Early Country of the Imagination,” Springs Projects, 20 Jay Street, Suite 311B, Brooklyn, NY. Through January 24, 2026.
About the author: Patrick Neal will be an artist-in-residence at The Webb School in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the winter of 2026. His work is included in “Color of Growth,” a group exhibition at Millbrook Arts Project in Millbrook, NY, from January 9–February 28, 2026. Neal is a co-founder of Show&Tell, a lecture series at the New York Irish Center in Queens.
