A Cry for a Way of Being

BEANS

CAROLINE CAMPOS
A CRY FOR A WAY OF BEING

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

“Look!” And laugh in astonishment,

And bow their heads.

— Mary Oliver, “Mysteries, Yes”

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be

are full of trees and changing leaves.

— Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

What memories do trees hold? What can the ocean remember?
How might nature show us how to carry less, notice more, and let go with grace?

Stepping into Spill 180’s exhibit Waves is like seeing something new in a familiar way. Perhaps that is because artists Alana Zack and Lorna Bauer both work with what is already there. From wood carving to glass blowing, painting shorelines to photographing gardens, these artists are in conversation with the materials they are transforming — changed by either the pressure of a chisel, the heat of a kiln, or the chemical reactions made in a dark room. Bauer’s liquid mirror photographs and glass pieces follow light as it drifts across surfaces, revealing perception as a living process, while Zack’s paintings and wood sculptures circle back to the shoreline, where the magnitude and presence of nature reminds us that we are all in fact quite small. Both artists explore how landscape is sensed, embodied, and remembered; with an ongoing dialogue between past and present being a through-line in their work.

At times I wonder if those who are constantly conversing with the past learn to command it, or if they ultimately kneel before it, at its mercy and under its control. The past speaks to me at unexpected moments — memories are involuntary, environmental, and triggering. A smell, a street, a quality of light can summon history without permission. Maybe nostalgia, then, is not remembrance but visitation—memory arriving unannounced, asking only to be felt.

For Alana Zack, nostalgia is distinct from memory. “For me the word is like yearning” she explains, “and contains the future and dreams, as well as the past…. And even past times I never knew. I'd say I'm nostalgic for prehistoric times, for times before technology….” As the warmer months arrive, Zack returns to carving in the Catskills. Her practice follows the rhythm of the seasons out of necessity: winter brings freezing temperatures and heavy snow, rendering fields impassable and leaving her logs stranded until the land releases its hold. When the snow melts and daylight stretches longer, working outdoors becomes possible again. Plus, the noise of a chainsaw and the abundance of sawdust find their natural place in open air rather than a Brooklyn studio. Here, her practice moves beyond the confines of a studio, embedded in the landscape and shaped by nature itself.

Working with both wood and paint invites Zack to embrace spontaneity. “You make a mark and you respond to it.” At Waves, she pointed me to a large knot in the back of one of her pieces saying how sometimes you can have a plan for how you want to carve but then you encounter a knot in the wood or a colony of ants. “Spontaneity comes from the material you are working with.” It is this dialogue between artist and material that is essential to the work, and she assures me that is a requirement to listen to what your materials need.

A tree. A body of wood. Its age is recorded in the rings of its trunk—witness to fire and drought, surviving by remembering winter. What a magical relationship, I thought, to be handling something much older and wiser than you, and to give it a second life through your mark.

Then as winter arrives, Zack’s seasonal practice moves indoors and her hibernating months of painting begins. She describes painting as internal and solitary; an artistic practice that spills into late hours of the night, under the guidance of the moon.

Inside Spill 180’s gallery space, I nestle onto one of Zack’s wooden sculptures made for sitting. The figures in her paintings take shape like sculptures themselves — appearing paused or at rest, echoing my own reclined posture against the wood, as if saying to each other: I’m in no hurry to leave, let’s just sit here until time forgets about us. I recall Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost where she defines blue as the color of distance, longing, and the unattainable. She describes it as “the color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.” Zack returns to the color blue throughout her work, often painting scenes inspired by her coastal upbringing, depicting bodies of water, bodies at rest, bodies in longing, all submerged in a blue dreamscape.

My heartbreak lives inside this shade of blue.

I haven’t spoken to My Favorite Person, who has now become My Far Away Person, in three months, the length of a season: the span in which deciduous trees grow between 1-2 feet, butterflies are born and die, snowpacks become drinking water. Trees need space in order to grow, or at least that’s how I’ve come to understand My Far Away Person’s no contact. Crown shyness is a natural phenomenon in some tree species where neighboring tree canopies maintain small gaps between each other, avoiding direct contact in order to prevent damage from collision and maximize sunlight exposure. In just 90 days, nature can complete full life cycles, reshape landscapes, and transform ecosystems from dormant to fully active. But our season of not speaking has kept everything suspended—not ended, just waiting.

Hoping my absence still holds your attention.

Nothing is stagnant in Lorna Bauer’s work and transformation is crucial, happening in either liquid or heat. Working with glass and photography, both alchemic explorations, Bauer investigates the ways in which memory resides within materials and how artistic transformation can hold, alter, and reimagine those memories. She cites, “One of the main reasons I work with analog photography is for material exploration. I enjoy being in the darkroom and seeing images slowly emerge on paper, rising up in the dark through a chemical reaction.” She changes materials from one state to another; her mark giving second life to whatever she is transforming.

I’ve always thought of art as a way of preserving experiences—a response to the human awareness that time will inevitably make us forget the things we hope to remember. As a keeper of private notebooks—the type of person Joan Didion describes as “lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss,” – I return often to what I’ve written. Each rereading reminds me that memory is not fixed; it alters as we alter.

To revisit old feelings is to measure change. Without that act, we might stay suspended in our former selves. Always skeptical of memory, I write as a way of saying: This is who I was, and this is how the world looked to me then.

Lorna Bauer, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place (1 of 35) (2025). Hand poured liquid mirror, kiln-formed glass, silver gelatin, polaroid. 14” x 11” in.

Bauer assures me that photography isn’t a way for her to preserve memory or stop time. “It’s about drawing attention to moments that might otherwise be overlooked. I almost never photograph people. I see photography as a way to frame or highlight a visual moment, not as something nostalgic or an attempt to preserve the past.” For her, archive is not static; it’s where past and present exist in a kind of timeless dialogue. She describes her photography series as “about the small insignificant moments being observed.” One of Bauer’s pieces is titled after Georges Perec’s book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Bauer came upon the book in Paris during a residency some years earlier. She occupied a live-in studio on a high floor in a former convent, its windows opening onto a garden below. From this elevated position, she began photographing passersby as they moved through the space, while also noting fleeting moments of small interactions she observed. Her time in Paris marked the first time Bauer even considered using glass as a material in her work — shaped by the expansive, floor-to-ceiling French windows she was looking and photographing through.

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris documents Georges Perec’s observations over three days in October 1974 while he sits at cafés around Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Rather than describing monuments or historical significance, Perec records the mundane flow of daily life. One of the text’s central ideas is Perec’s concept of the infra-ordinary—the everyday elements of life that are so familiar they become invisible. It doesn’t teach us about Paris so much as it teaches us how to look, and encourages readers to notice their own everyday environments differently. “When it came time to title the piece at Spill 180,” says Bauer, “I thought back to this book and realized I had chosen uneventful moments from my archive, moments gathered over many years and in many different places. The title seemed appropriate as it was a collection of photographs in which I observed using the camera, small details of life and chose to highlight them, much in the same way Perec was observing and writing down the moments he saw and then presenting them to the world in written form.”

Despite the title, Perec never truly “exhausts” the place. The accumulation of details highlights the impossibility of fully capturing reality. Zack tells me that her work, too, holds a philosophy on attention,“A philosophy of where to look... the landscapes I photograph for instance... they're simple, sparse, and right in front of us... A flat horizon line, a tree on a hill, a couple rocks.” Perhaps this is what Alana Zack and Lorna Bauer are both reaching for, crying out for a way of being that has grown so familiar it’s become invisible to those who have forgotten how to look.

My attempt: Do not turn away from the ache that makes you miss people with your whole body. For that is how you know life still has its hooks in you. Be porous and wanting. Sometimes it will be lonely but if you are lucky you might witness a miracle. The kind of miracle that only happens when you wait and stay and pay attention. Time is on your side. Let the pressure of a chainsaw or chisel have its way at you. Surrender. And offer something back to this world in exchange.

Lorna Bauer makes the invisible (her breath) visible in every glass blown.

Warmer months will circle back around and call out to Alana Zack who will answer the call and return to her field, offering shedding wood chips and sawdust to the land for decomposition.

Maybe archive is the crossroad where yesterday and today keep meeting, passing meaning between then and now. Maybe it’s where sky and ocean kiss, as so many of Zack’s paintings depict. It is easy to think of someday, somewhere, when looking out onto a horizon. A place where time folds and everything is now. Maybe that has always been where I cry out to be.

Alana Zack, Red Hook at Midnight (2025). 24 x 30 in, acrylic on pine.

My attempt: do not turn away from the ache that makes you miss people with your whole body. For that is how you know life still has its hooks in you. Be porous and wanting. Sometimes it will be lonely but if you are lucky you might witness a miracle. The kind of miracle that only happens when you wait and stay and pay attention. Time is on your side. Let the pressure of a chainsaw or chisel have its way at you. Surrender. And offer something back to this world in exchange.