Springs Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by American artists Donna Dennis and Tommy Hartung. Featuring gouache paintings, photographs, and dioramas by Dennis alongside a feature-length film and sculptural assemblage by Hartung, Night Traveling in the Early Country of the Imagination will bring to light a rich artistic conversation between these two artists, arising in response to their rural New York environs, to the source material of their childhoods, and to the bonds of a former teacher and student.
Drawing on the iconography of a family farm in Western New York, Tommy Hartung’s animated and physical landscapes engage deeply with the material histories that shape a place. Hartung’s feature-length animation, The Chautauqua County Almanac traces the evolutionary journey of lime plaster technology, from its origins in ancient Levantine mortuary customs to its modern applications in rural American farming. Inspired by Aldo Leopold’s seminal environmental work, A Sand County Almanac, the project unfolds against the backdrop of Hartung’s family’s grape farm in Chautauqua County, a rural area in western New York. The film represents the culmination of a six-year endeavor, incorporating outdoor time-lapse photography captured by trail cameras and three-dimensional landscape scans.
Hartung defamiliarizes his subject by combining agricultural data and local lore with handmade AI slop. The spliced, looping, glitchy narration is studded with repetitions and gaps, rendering an uncanny portrait of a place—like an apocryphal story or like a folk tale from an era of large language models. The spellbinding Almanac is accompanied by assemblages of artifacts that appear in the film.
Like Hartung, Donna Dennis is attuned to the markers of memory and passing time—and to the correspondence between natural and supernatural elements. Dennis, like Hartung, left New York City in 2019 after living downtown for fifty years. When she moved to the Hudson Valley, Dennis turned from her urban preoccupations—bridges, subway tunnels, and towers—to the rural structures around her, resonant with associations from her early life in Springfield, Ohio.
In this series of gouache paintings, photographs, and dioramas, Dennis takes as her subject the view from the barn-like studio where she works. Within the frame, her own Shaker-style house sits off-center like a human figure on the landscape, silent witness to mysterious nighttime phenomena. Compared to the large architectural installations Dennis is best-known for, the intimate scale of these works suggests the elemental work of beginning anew, of pursuing something elusive in darkness and solitude. The works reflect Dennis’s reverence for the night, as a temporal expanse that sets the imagination loose like a traveler in search of ultimate things: beauty, survival, the self.
Born in Akron, Ohio, and based in Fredonia, New York, Tommy Hartung is an artist and educator specializing in animation and mixed-media sculpture. His work explores the intersections of history, technology, and narrative.
Hartung’s solo exhibitions include The Bible (2014), an exploration of ideology and myth through handcrafted props and stop-motion animation, and King Solomon’s Mines at the Rose Art Museum, which examined colonial narratives through the fusion of found objects and digital manipulation.
In addition to his solo projects, Hartung’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Hermitage Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (2017), the Hammer Museum, and the Jewish Museum. His works are included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Rose Art Museum. He is also a recipient of the 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant and the 2016 Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant.
Hartung serves as Assistant Professor of Digital Art in the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology program at Penn State Behrend, where he teaches courses in visual media and narrative construction. Prior to this appointment, he taught at the State University of New York at Purchase and New York University, sharing his expertise in digital arts and animation.
Donna Dennis is an American sculptor, painter, and printmaker. Born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1942, Dennis established herself in New York in the 1970s as a pioneer of installation art and a leading figure in the architectural sculpture movement. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Holly Solomon Gallery, as well as the Brooklyn Museum, the Neuberger Museum, and the Sculpture Center, among others. Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the National Academy Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Walker Art Center, MoMA PS1, Tate Gallery, ICA London, and the Ludwig Forum for International Art. A frequent collaborator, Dennis has worked with poets Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, Daniel Wolff, and Ted Berrigan, as well as with performance artist/puppeteer Dan Hurlin.
Dennis’s work is held in prominent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Art Museum, the Microsoft Collection, the Walker Art Center, the Ludwig Forum for International Art, the Indianapolis Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Neuberger Museum, and the Martin Z. Margulies Collection. Permanent public art commissions are located at Kennedy Airport, P.S. 234, and Queens College in New York and at the Wonderland MBTA Station in Boston.
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Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, several National Endowment Fellowships, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants. She’s also received the Artists’ Legacy Foundation Award, the Merit Award in Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. She was elected to the National Academy of Design in 2010 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2025. In 2023, The Monacelli Press published a monograph that surveys her career as an artist, Donna Dennis: Poet in Three Dimensions. In 2024, Bamberger Books published an edited volume of her journals, Writing Toward Dawn: Selected Journals 1969–1982.
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Dennis is Professor Emerita at Purchase College, SUNY. She lives and works in Clermont, New York.
