EXHIBITION: Opening: Watershed Moment at Lyndhurst Mansion. Tarrytown, New York, 3 July 2021
Watershed Moment is a site-specific art installation commissioned to mark the opening of Lyndhurst’s cavernous and unrestored swimming pool building after a period of extensive stabilization of the building’s structure. Combining water sounds and dust and conceived as a meditative space by artist and historic preservation expert Jorge Otero-Pailos, the installation invites visitors to pause and reflect on the memories, both personal, social, and environmental, that define each of us. The installation includes latex casts of the raw brick interior walls of the pool building suspended from ceiling joists over the empty swimming pool below. While perambulating the mosaic tile-inlaid pool deck, visitors can experience these 67-foot-long curtains of glowing latex while being enveloped by a series of water sounds recorded from throughout New York State. In its unrestored state, the building is spacious, unsealed, and well-ventilated with a clear directional path through the exhibition, providing ample social-distancing space between visitors.
Built by Helen Gould in 1911, the Lyndhurst swimming pool building was designed as a Roman bath for the late Gilded Age elite. It was abandoned during World War II when coal was unavailable to heat the boilers. Over the years it was destroyed by water leaking through the roof, causing plaster and wood elements to deteriorate. Today it is evocatively ruined but in a stabilized condition. Watershed Moment marks the first time that the Lyndhurst swimming pool building will be open to the public as a museum space.
For more information and to visit, see the event page here.