The 'No W here' Collective Explores The Truth Of The Faking Box

We’ve all heard the familiar refrain on airplanes. If the oxygen masks drop from the overhead compartment, put on your own mask first before assisting others.

It’s an apt metaphor for a trio of East End artists — Alice Hope, Bastienne Schmidt and Toni Ross — who, a year ago, had a joint exhibition, titled “No W here,” at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York City.

The show’s title was a play on words, of sorts, and could be read as either “Now Here,” or “Nowhere.” In truth, it could go either way, and the show spoke to the sense of uncertainty and introspection brought on by a global pandemic and social upheaval.

As a prompt for the exhibition, the artists agreed to each select an artifact from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection to respond to in their work. By sheer coincidence, all three chose the same piece: “Navigational Chart (Rebbilib),” an object from the remote Marshall Islands constructed from coconut palm frond pieces bound together with string in a grid pattern.

Though nearly sculptural in design, the chart, which dates to the 19th or early 20th century, was a functional artifact used on ocean voyages as a map, providing mariners with information on the location of islands and ocean currents in the South Pacific.

The work each artist created in response to the navigational chart may have been inspired by its physical properties, but that was only part of the story. The three artists selected the object as their prompt in December 2019, before anybody knew what the coming year would bring, and it turned out to be a choice loaded with meaning as the chart came to represent our own need for wayfinding in the midst of worldwide tragedy.

“It was such a foreshadowing that we had decided on it,” Hope noted of the chart.

But here we are, a year later and the artists — who call themselves the No W here Collective — have come together again to create a second show in response to a singular museum object, this time on the East End, where all three live. And in this exhibition, titled “Now Here,” instead of searching for internal strength in confusing times, the artists are directing their energies outward, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word.

From July 16 through September 30, “Now Here” is being offered at the Amagansett U.S. Life-Saving Station Museum as an offsite exhibition under the aegis of Guild Hall and its curator Christina Mossaides Strassfield. In creating work for this show, the artists focused on a peculiar object in the Life-Saving Station’s collection that served not as a means to find one’s way, but rather as a tool to take decisive action.

Called a “faking box,” their chosen object from the Life-Saving Station’s collection was historically used to assist foundering ships off the coast of the South Fork. Consisting of a wooden platform with a series of vertical wooden pegs around which rope was wound in a very specific pattern, the faking box is an object of great beauty with a singular utilitarian purpose. In an emergency, the box could be flipped over and lifted off the rope, which was then shot out to a boat in distress. The deliberate way in which the rope was wound around the pegs meant it would reach the vessel without tangling.

In other words, it’s a lifeline.

“When I first saw it, I knew either we were going to fight over it or share it,” said Hope of the faking box. “Immediately, there was this magnetic pull. I think it goes with each of our aesthetics, as a minimalist object it’s gorgeous.”

“It’s a perfect object, and there’s something about the natural beauty of that and the navigational chart,” Ross added. “The intent wasn’t to be a piece of art, but it’s the natural result of necessity, and they’re both unbelievably elegant objects, as is the Life-Saving Station building. That building is elegance personified, one of my pieces in this show is simply responding to the building itself.”

The navigational aspect of last year’s show in the city and the lifesaving aspect of this show in Amagansett offer a connection of themes that are significant for Ross in terms of her own experience in riding out the pandemic as an artist.

“I believe the work I did throughout quarantine and beyond was a personal life-saving venture — it was more about me than anything else,” said Ross. “So my response in this show is about that a bit more than it is about the history of that museum. It’s about life-saving itself.”

“The Life-Saving Station’s faking box is formally beautiful, and poetically and conceptually inspiring,” Hope noted. “I think of it as emblematic to the Life-Saving Station itself — it’s the organizing principle to a lifeline. For the last few years I’ve been stringing can tabs to make a continuous line that resembles rope. Sometimes the line accumulates in tangled piles, and often I organize it into spiral forms. The faking box will inspire a new organization — a new form of my continuous can tab line.”

“As artists, you have a few tools. You can express yourself, you can communicate something and you can preserve yourself,” Schmidt added. “So we became our own life preservers, but also we had something important philosophically to tell society. What are our values? How do we go on? What sustains us? Sustaining is not just physical, but also spiritual. We make the meaning of life. All of our lives quieted down tremendously, but there is still value in thinking about a space, an object, history and the future.”

The idea of helping others emerged as the overarching theme in “Now Here,” not only in terms of the historic functionality of both the Life-Saving Station and the faking box, but also in terms of where the three artists currently are in this collaborative artistic journey. While leading up to the 2021 exhibition, the artists were still putting on their own masks, making work to process their own confusion and issues brought on by the pandemic; now they are emerging from that phase and looking to reconnect and reach out to others.

“In a way, it was helpful to have the navigational chart in the first show, and this faking box now — strong objects that ask for new interpretations and answers,” Schmidt explained. “It’s nice to have something that grounds us, but on the other hand gives us plenty of freedom. As an artist, you can’t be scripted. You need to express what’s important to yourself.

“The other connectivity is the relationship to the sea,” she added. “We all have lived here a long time, we have respect for the sea, but there are also people who work with the sea and it can be complicated.”

Though the faking box is an object designed to save the lives of hardened sailors in rough and tumble seas, the artists were also drawn to its design, which speaks to the notion of hearth and home and a rope pattern that evokes weaving, fabric and functionality.

“I love the hybrid communication between male and female energy,” said Schmidt. “I like this idea that sailors also had to use thread to work on the sails to repair them. It’s something that brings us together, these domestic objects that have different uses, metaphorically and practically speaking.”

The history of the Amagansett Life-Saving Station began with its construction in 1902 as part of a network of 30 such stations on Long Island. For decades, it was staffed by those who kept watch for ships in distress and were at the ready to rescue sailors.

On June 13, 1942, the station garnered fame for a different reason when four Nazi saboteurs landed nearby after being dropped off by a U-boat. Once ashore, they encountered Seaman John C. Cullen, who ran to the Life-Saving Station to report the incident. Though the saboteurs escaped by boarding a train to New York City, they were soon caught and put on trial before they could carry out their mission.

The Amagansett Life-Saving Station was decommissioned after World War II and in 1966 was sold to historian Joel Carmichael, who moved it onto the bluff nearby to serve as a home for his family. After he died in 2006, the family gave the building back to the Town of East Hampton and it was moved back to its original location. It opened to the public as a museum in 2017.

“One of the gifts of doing this project, just like there have been gifts through the tragedy of COVID, is meeting the people who are really invested in that museum and have worked hard to sustain it,” said Ross. “I went to remeasure one day, and I just had the greatest conversation with some of the people there. The father of one of the docents was one of the Coast Guard guys there. It was a great conversation, not only about the museum but about the area itself. That has been a real eye-opener for me.”

When asked how they arrived at the idea of having a show at the museum, Ross replied, “Alice was looking at the space for a couple of years, coveting it. I had never been there. So many people have not been there. It is so elegant, the building itself is of perfect proportions and it sits on the land in this extraordinary way. The history of the building is fascinating and unexpected.”

While the initial goal was to have a site-specific exhibition that ran concurrently with the gallery show in the city, that plan didn’t quite pan out.

“But then it evolved and is working out perfectly,” Hope said. “This show has autonomy in that its based around the faking box. We have liberated ourselves from the navigational chart, but it’s still sort of an undercurrent.

“And we’re getting to work with Guild Hall which is amazing,” added Ross.

“It’s a dream come true,” said Hope. “I’m trying my best to be so specific to the site and not have any preconceived attachment. There is a thread of my material that I usually work with, but there’s also new materials. I’ve been very busy.”

The timing is fortuitous for this show in that Guild Hall’s building in East Hampton is currently undergoing renovations and will be closed for the next year. So Strassfield, who brings her curatorial skills to this offsite project, recalls that when Hope, Ross and Schmidt came to her with the proposal for “Now Here,” she was immediately taken with the idea.

“It sounded so wonderful and they had already thought of the location,” explained Strassfield. “We went through the Life-Saving Station and when I saw the faking box, that just seemed like a natural fit for them. I loved the idea, because I felt like during COVID, they were life-savers to one another, supporting one another, encouraging one another and creating life, creating art. It’s wonderful to have that second stage here and to have it move forward in such a beautiful, natural way — and creating art is saving life.

“I curated shows with Alice, Bastienne and Toni at Guild Hall, I know them, I’ve followed their work for years,” Strassfield added. “It’s exciting to work with them again on this type of work, which is totally different than planning a show at Guild Hall, a space I know. Here, I’m learning about the space as we go along and as we walk through with the artists their vision has been exciting to me, I see things a little differently — that interpretation and give-and-take is interesting.

“They immediately understood the importance of that life-saving aspect to themselves, to the building, to the history of the area, and to Guild Hall. All the interconnectedness, to me, was the best,” she said. “I think the chart gave direction, now they’re saving someone. What will the third iteration be? They will conquer another area.”

“Now Here” featuring the artwork of Alice Hope, Toni Ross and Bastienne Schmidt runs July 16 through September 30 at the Amagansett U.S. Life-Saving Station, 160 Atlantic Avenue, Amagansett. Hours are Friday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Related events include a “Meet the Artists Talk & Walkabout” on Sunday, July 31, at 3 p.m.; Family workshops with the artists on Saturday, August 6, and Saturday, August 13, from noon to 3 p.m.; and a panel discussion with the “Now Here” artists on Saturday, August 20, at 5 p.m. For more details visit guildhall.org or amagansettlss.org.