Monumental Schaub Artwork on Display at Helmholz Fine Art
Rokeby is the name of an exciting, new, 30 foot artwork to be shown at Helmholz Fine Art in Manchester, VT from June 22 to June 29, with an opening reception and artist talk on June 22 from 5 to 7 PM.
Combining in-camera collage on film with handwritten text and depicting scenes from the historic radical Quaker homestead and Underground Railroad site, Rokeby is the product of a new collaboration between acclaimed artist Stephen Schaub, and his wife, noted author Eve Schaub.
Rokeby, located in Ferrisburg Vermont, was an active site on the Underground Railroad as well as a homestead and working farm to four successive generations of Vermont Quakers. In the artwork, Stephen Schaub employs a 140 degree Noblex panning-lens camera, which creates individual panoramas that mimic human vision. The resulting in-camera college on film expresses a total combined reality of 840 degrees- a scene rooted in reality, yet which does not actually exist.
This imagery is then overlaid and interwoven by texts handwritten into the work by Eve Schaub, drawing from the Rokeby Museum’s vast material archive. Working with museum curators, Eve Schaub selected for inscription sixteen different passages ranging in date from 1843 up until the present day, written by the farmers, abolitionists, artists, and writers who made Rokeby their home.
The artwork has been featured in the exhibition Rokeby: Through the Lens, and on the WCAX evening newscast. It has received positive reviews from Seven Days and will be the subject of a piece in the upcoming issue of Vermont Magazine. Participating in the artist’s talk and discussion will be both the artists, as well as Ric Kasini Kadour, visiting contemporary curator at the Rokeby Museum, and Catherine Brooks, Director of the Rokeby Museum.
Kadour, has this to say about the artwork: “Great art demands that we slow down and look and ponder, three things contemporary life rarely allows us to do. The Rokeby photograph is a near perfect example of how contemporary art can pick up the unfinished work of history and speak to us in the present.”
Helmholz Fine Art is proud to present this important cultural and social artwork for an exclusive showing in Southern Vermont.