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Abbey Meaker



Motherhouse
Floodplains
Star Island




Information
Projects



An Order
St. Josephs’s Orphanage
Burlington, Vermont


 



In August of 2015, the austere rooms of a former orphanage on North Avenue in Burlington, Vermont were transformed into installation-based artworks for the exhibition An Order.  Four Vermont-based artists, Wylie Garcia, Sarah O Donnell, Rebecca Weisman, and Mary Zompetti each created installations in the domestic and religious spaces of the former Saint Joseph’s Providence Orphan Asylum.

This exhibition was organized by Abbey Meaker who spent three years before investigating the space and its history in her lens-based artwork. To close her time there, the artist invited noted Vermont artists to investigate the space, using photography, video, sound, and light to explore and respond to the site. The artists installed the works just prior to the exhibition, and de-installed them following the closing, making space for the planned housing developments that have since reshaped the orphanage.

Read art historian & curator Amy Rahn’s essay about the exhibition.