Most Of The Time We Find The Places We Mean To Go, But Sometimes Places Find Us
by Lisa Peet

Most of the time we find the places we mean to go, but sometimes places find us. Laura Hewitt and Meridith McNeal have been collaborating since 1996, long before they discovered the Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, New York, but their work has always involved the type of layered connection to the past that Hopper House represents. With their installation She Must Have Looked Lovely in That Dress (November 2004), they bring their methods of storytelling to a setting that is firmly rooted in its own very personal history. The result is a narrative dialogue; the setting talks to the work and the work talks back, each voice contributing to a tale about time and place.

The house, built in 1858 by Hopper’s grandfather, was restored in the 1970s by the Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation and the Village of Nyack. It operates now as a community cultural center and gallery space, with an emphasis on projects that relate to its history. Hewitt and McNeal’s work has always examined the way time interacts with sense of place. Working from opposite ends of the country, the two have managed to forge a coherent vision from different directions and have, serendipitously, ended up here.

Laura Hewitt’s window hangings, computer images altered with watercolor and printed on large silk panels, make a transition from the modern world outside to the dignified wood and plaster interior. They combine elements both constrained by their time and perpetual, natural and manmade: computer circuitry and the fretwork of bones, pre-Raphaelite paintings, astrological charts. The boundaries between past and present are seamlessly crossed and then crossed back. Ages loom and recede in fluid motion. It’s easy to see how Hopper grew up with an appreciation of the sun in all its forms here. Clear river light pours in from the Hudson and Hewitt’s silks transform it, their jewel tones dappling the quiet rooms like stained glass.

Inside, past trumps present. Meridith McNeal has altered early 20th century books, sheet music, letters, maps, calendars, and doilies – romantic and practical signposts of another time – to reference the history of Hopper, the Hudson Valley, and America in more idealistic years. This ephemera, loving evidence of a long-gone human hand, has been gathered up and retouched with affection. A 1919 New York Automobile Blue Book is overpainted with details from Hopper’s paintings in honor of his upstate travels, period clothing embellished on sheet music covers, maps and floor plans woven about with doilies and lacework. In each piece, history serves as both canvas and subject, one perspective deftly superimposed on another.

The show takes its title from a letter of Hopper’s describing his mother’s wedding dress, which is a part of Hopper House’s permanent collection. Meridith McNeal has fashioned a full-sized wedding dress herself, from vintage sheet music. Not simply a replica of the original, it stands on its own – literally, with the integrity of good, strong paper – and the two become part of an ongoing dialogue about tradition and leisure, material and intent. And, as always, time and place. With the convergence of Hewitt and McNeal on the Hopper House Art Center, the present has gotten the chance to speak to the past, and the past, in turn, can continue the conversation.

--Lisa Peet is an artist and author. Her recent writing can be found in Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts, Soft Skull Press (November 9, 2004).