From Away
Overnight Projects presents From Away at the Sandbar Inn on Lake Champlain
For three days only Overnight Projects will bring the historic lakeside Sandbar Inn to life with site-specific artworks by five regionally-based artists. Mid-summer exhibition From Away will occupy the former motel from Friday, July 27, through Sunday, July 29, with original multi-disciplinary installations by Wren Kitz, Angus McCullough, Sarah O Donnell, Charmaine Wheatley, and Mary Zompetti.
As an icon of transience, the roadside motel is simultaneously a place of leisure and utility, occupying a space in the American imagination that conjures nostalgia, longing, and sometimes, fear. The Sandbar Inn, built in the 1950s, was for decades a quintessential vacation spot — the stuff of sunsets, mod bathing suits, and hand-tinted postcards home.
Long before its role as a site for Vacationland fantasies, the sandbar was a key point of transport for First Peoples and, post-colonization, for the burgeoning Northeastern railroad network. The thin, shallow strip of land was referred to as “the carrying place” by the Abenaki, who took advantage of its geography to transport their canoes. As the gateway between the mainland and the Lake Champlain Islands, the sandbar represents both physical and psychological crossings — an interstitial place you could briefly call home if you rented a room at the Sandbar Inn.
In 2018, the now-dilapidated motel is tinged by yet another layer of history: the rippling effects of the recession on both the American middle class and its outgrowth, the hospitality industry.
These entwined environmental and cultural histories will inform the works in From Away, ranging from an intangible audio environment created by Wren Kitz to a sculptural intervention by Angus McCullough to immersive analog projections by Mary Zompetti. Each artist will let the inn guide their creation of new works, many of which will incorporate materials gleaned from the immediate surroundings — among these, haphazardly strewn planks and otherworldly seed pods. With reverence and care, From Away will once again animate the rooms of the Sandbar Inn with voices from elsewhere.