The American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church grew up swaddled in wealth and made a heap more as one of the most famous artists of his era. In 1872 he and his family moved into a bespoke house that blended Persian, Moorish, and Italianate architecture high on a hill overlooking the Hudson River, just across from the town of Catskill. They called the place Olana and stocked it with treasures and art collected over years of travel in Europe and the Middle East. Landscape views unfolded in every direction, framed by Church’s carefully pruned vegetation and freshly planted trees; he’d found a passion for making three-dimensional vistas that rivaled his desire to paint them.
On one of the sloping lawns of Olana, state-owned since 1966, the British American artist Ellen Harvey has built Winter in the Summer House, an enclosed gazebo made of gold-framed mirrors that reflect their natural surroundings and—from certain angles—Olana itself. The silver backs of the mirrors have been laser-engraved with a glacial seascape imagined by Harvey, so that when you enter the gazebo, filtered daylight creates a hexagonal panorama of icebergs floating under a cloud-pummeled sky.
As soon as you’re inside, the door swings closed, smoothly joining itself to the seascape. On the August afternoon when I visited, the heat was suffocating; after I’d pivoted a few times to take in the work, I couldn’t tell where the exit was and began to palpate the walls in a state of increasingly confused panic. It does not seem, from the experiences of others, including Harvey herself, that the gazebo is intended to be an airless, imprisoning sweatbox, effective as that is in foregrounding one of her themes. For those who visit on a cold day or miss the obvious, small protest signs depicting icebergs are engraved on some of the mirrors, based on sketches Church made in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Harvey has always been interested in disrupting our experience of beauty. Olana’s scenic grounds are reflected in the gazebo’s outer mirrors until you get too close, at which point all you see is yourself marring the view. If you want to take a photo of the reflected landscape without your image in it, you need to contort your body out of the frame. To step inside the gazebo is to move from that tamed, human-shaped view of nature into a setting traditionally considered sublime, beyond our control: the untouched grandeur of icebergs is supposed to make us feel our irrelevance. But here the concept breaks apart, since we have managed to make ourselves relevant to the icebergs by melting them. Inside, the lower part of the gazebo is tinged a sickly green, suggesting not only foliage but also the stained walls of a house after floodwaters have receded.
In a three-year endeavor that she called New York Beautification Project (1999–2001), Harvey illegally painted five-by-seven-inch oval oil landscapes on forty walls and other surfaces around the city. At a time when Mayor Rudy Giuliani was cracking down on graffiti, they were intended as an ironic fillip to the conversation about street art, seeming to confirm preconceptions about what “art” should look like: representational oil paintings depicting beautiful landscapes based on classical European models. Mostly tolerated, even appreciated, these anodyne landscapes—which looked aspirational in urban settings far removed from bucolic pastures—were a blandly picturesque version of graffiti’s wilder and more abstract conventions. (Her book documenting this project, including her droll interactions with bystanders, is a delight.)
Some American critics erroneously thought Harvey’s graffiti landscapes were inspired by the Hudson River School, the movement to which Church nominally belongs, making the gazebo’s appearance on his estate a pleasingly deceptive circle. The installation is partly a tribute to Church’s environmentalism since, despite his careful sculpting of Olana’s hilltop environment, he valued ecological health as much as aesthetics and embraced Alexander von Humboldt’s influential understanding of the natural world as a delicately interconnected system.
Alert to disappearances of all kinds, Harvey has lately been enlisting the help of the public to memorialize losses for a project she calls The Disappointed Tourist, a series of hand-tinted postcard paintings of places that have vanished because of time, war, and other catastrophes (currently on view at the USF Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, Florida). Answering the question “Is there some place that you would like to visit or revisit that no longer exists?,” people have submitted everything from the Automat to Tulsa’s Black Wall Street to—inevitably—icebergs in general and Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier in particular, which melted away in 2009, six years before it was predicted to go.