Agricultural warehouses provide settings for big art

The small town of Lake City has big places for big art.

It may become something of a niche for ArtFields, a festival starting April 24 that has invited 400 artists from 12 Southeastern states.

All media are represented, but big pieces have made an impact this year. The festival has 18 outdoor installations, two of which required cranes to place them, festival director Ray McBride said.

Organizers threw out size restrictions and invited artists to go as large as they’d like.

“We want to see what these artists are capable of,” said Hannah Davis, director of the Jones-Carter Gallery.

“We have huge agricultural warehouse space. We’re in a unique position because when the agriculture economy tanked — ’60s, ’70s, early ’80s — there was no money to tear these buildings down so a lot of spaces with 12-, 15- and sometimes 18-foot ceilings are available.”

Visitors will see installations that include a dance performance piece, film and a lot of techno-media pieces, festival organizers said. Materials run the gambit from stainless steel to fiber netting to old VHS tape.

ArtFields relies on Main Street merchants to display a lot of art. But the festival bought and restored a tobacco and charcoal warehouse at the edge of town, too, and it’s the perfect venue for large pieces. It’s called The ROB, which stands for the Ragsdale Old Building (though locals tend to call it the old Ragsdale Building).

There, on a recent afternoon, New Orleans artist Alex Podesta was wrapping up the installation of “Self-Portrait as Bunnies (Bad Boy),” a collection of misbehaving, man-sized rabbits.

Podesta grew up in a small town in Virginia and finds himself fascinated by the idea that a place the size of Lake City can pull off such a big endeavor — bringing in 400 artists, or what amounts to one artist for every 17 townspeople.

“They seem interested in showing larger artwork like this,” said Podesta, who is participating in ArtFields for his first time.

West of town, at the 50-acre Moore Farms Botanical Garden, Vassiliki Falkehag worked with a team to install her site-specific work made of baling twine. Her piece — several pieces, actually — is scattered across a large pine bay.

Falkehag said Lake City provides unique settings for large installations and site-specific work, like her “Undomesticated.”

“There’s a lot of potential here for it,” she said.

This story was originally published April 4, 2015 at 10:20 PM with the headline "Agricultural warehouses provide settings for big art."