Fake Nature - A Site-Responsive Student Exhibition

Each spring, Stone Quarry collaborates with Professor Kim Waale’s sculpture class at Cazenovia College. Students work with Kim and Stone Quarry’s artistic director Sayward Schoonmaker to propose, develop, and make site-specific and site-responsive artworks on the park’s grounds. Student artists explored this year’s theme, “Fake Nature," from places of history, environmentalism, spirituality, pop culture, memory, and personal experience.

The artworks of Fake Nature respond to the Piney Woods, located near the park's entrance. The entirety of the park grounds are on the unceded territory of the People of the Standing Stone of Onyota’a:ká [Oneida]. From 1803 to the 1930s, the Piney Woods was the settler homestead of the widow Mary Hackley. Fire destroyed the homestead in the 1930/40s, but remnants remain: the house's foundation, cistern, and well are still visible today. Several works in this exhibition respond to, interpret, and imagine Hackley's homestead and its demise, and her work as a weaver and sewer. Other works exaggerate, animate, and activate the trees, plants, wildlife, and ground. All of the participating artists works' engage the site with a great span of humor, gravity, and sentiment.

The thirteen works will be on view until Friday, May 5.

Fake Nature: works by Bailey Bennett, Mackenzie Bennett, Lily Chaires, Kailee Corlew, Kailah Davis, Lily Demyen, Emily Doyle, Michela Farella, Brynne Livelsberger, Oksana McCrohan, Lauren Michel, Mackenzie Sayers, Jordan Walters