Vermont Gothic? ‘In the Shadow of the Hills’ is on view at the Bennington Museum

“Take me to the place souls get snatched,” by Shanta Lee. Photograph courtesy of The Bennington Museum.

Bennington, Vt. — For the Bennington Museum’s eighth annual December present, Curator Jamie Franklin invited 27 artists from the larger Bennington area to contribute work exploring what’s disquieting and mysterious inside and round them. The impressed outcomes are on view on the museum by the tip of the month and on the market by closed-bid public sale on the museum and on-line by the nineteenth.

In case you haven’t heard, Bennington is a really darkish place—at the least to the creativeness. The present’s presiding spirit is author Shirley Jackson, who printed deeply unsettling works akin to “The Haunting of Hill Home” and “The Lottery” whereas dwelling in North Bennington for 20 mid-century years. Portraits of Jackson present up in a lot of the works on view.

The darkness isn’t all Jackson’s doing, nevertheless. The widow Krieger was tried as a witch within the city of Pownal within the 1780s. Middie Rivers disappeared in 1945 whereas looking within the disincorporated ghost city of Glastenbury that borders Bennington, and Paula Welden, a Bennington School pupil, took a stroll on the Lengthy Path in 1946 and was by no means seen once more. Three different disappearances adopted in the identical normal neighborhood. Then got here an airplane crash, and the “Bennington Triangle” was born. Bennington School grad Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel “The Secret Historical past” added to the noir mystique. In 2018, the Journey Channel included Bennington among the many Most Terrifying Locations in America—and the locals chuckled.

Towards this backdrop of unease, the artists labored in lots of media, every taking to the shadows in their very own approach. Some, like George O. Stadnik, evoke spectral presences, and a few thrust back dread with whimsy, as in Rhonda Ratray’s little work of dwellings gone fallacious and the BenningTwins’ intelligent takeoffs on paranormal tourism. Portia Wassick, who grew up within the precise shadow of Glastenbury Mountain, inks a ghostly stair and a smoking lantern, amongst different ominous photos. Images by Lodiza LePore and Shanta Lee diffuse a quiet menace, whereas Madalyn Olson’s ceramic heads come proper out of the wall at you. A really fashionable darkness stands behind Vivian Gonzalez’s “The Guide of Most cancers,” with its illustrated transcriptions of paperwork and information stories concerning PFOA contamination of wells in North Bennington by a manufacturing facility that when manufactured Teflon coatings. Jeweler Katie Cleaver is again with an beautiful moonstone-and-gold pendant that could possibly be used as an amulet.

The ground for bids varies from work to work and ranges from the tens to the 1000’s of {dollars}. Proceeds from gross sales are cut up between the museum and the artists.

Artist statements are additionally a part of the enjoyable. The curious will be taught that sculptor Hugh Joudry spent a lot of the summer season of 1968 as a hearth lookout atop the Stratton Mountain fireplace tower (in pre-development days) and the way that have has formed his artwork. Joudry lives and works on the base of Stratton to this present day, carving in wooden and marble. His enigmatic “The Misplaced” in white Vermont marble gazes in two instructions from a pedestal.

The exhibition is meant to foreshadow subsequent summer season’s historically-based Haunted Vermont present on the museum. Bear in mind, simply because there aren’t any ghosts doesn’t imply that individuals can’t see them.

Phil Holland writes from a hillside in widow Krieger’s residence city of Pownal, Vt.