Modern art show is a ‘beacon of the alternative’ in rural Pennsylvania

POTTSVILLE, Pa.- A quaint American still life unfolds along a gravel driveway, just off a winding road in the hills here. A tiny, white cabin sits in the sun. Christmas trees grow in a field above it. Off to the side, there’s a red barn with a rusty basketball hoop hammered into its planks.

Strange sounds are coming from the clapboard cabin, though, something like an animal growling backwards and a phone ringing underwater. Inside, a projector casts images of a woman with lines of fake blood streaked across her torso. She’s in and out of a bear suit, performing what she calls “a ritualistic dance of death in an eerie alternate reality.”

Forget the pastoral vibes. This is modern art, in rural Pennsylvania.

“This is a real weird show,” said artist Julia Oldham, creator and star of “The Bearwife,” the short, digital film playing in the cabin. “I love it.”

Oldham was one of six multidisciplinary artists whose work was on display Sunday at the opening of Cabin Contemporary’s “The Devil Made Me Do It” exhibit. Pieces included small acrylic paintings of devils, album covers made surreal with latex, and Oldham’s uncanny film. The goal of the small show — all of the art was displayed in the two-room cabin — was to offer something “benevolent yet mischievous,” its curator, Lance Rautzhan, said.

Cabin Contemporary is something you’d expect to see in New York City, not a Schuylkill County Christmas tree farm. Rautzhan, the son of a Major League Baseball pitcher by the same name, grew up here, playing sports at nearby Blue Mountain High School like his dad. Rautzhan said he was born with an interest in art, starting with comic books, and he left the Pennsylvania coal region to explore that passion in Queens, Baltimore, and eventually, Brooklyn.

“I was discouraged from going into art by guidance counselors and what not. It didn’t help that my dad was a pro athlete,” Rautzhan, 48, said at the house last month. “If I wasn’t on a field playing football or baseball, though, I was in the art room.”

Together with his wife, Megan, Rautzhan left the Bushwick section of Brooklyn in 2014 and moved back to his grandparents’ vacant farmhouse in Pottsville. He earned a master’s degree in art education from Penn State. The couple still traveled to New York often for work and shows.

Like the artists in his exhibit, Rautzhan works in a variety of mediums, including paint, video, and even music. Every wall in his studio is covered in his latest interest: paint marker drawings of personal objects on found fabric.

“Conceptually, my work swings between sincerity and honesty,” he said.

The Pottsville farmhouse became a place for friends and fellow artists to visit and relax in recent years, Rautzhan said, but the area, unlike the famed enclaves of upstate New York, wasn’t much of a destination for art.

“It’s not the same kind of rural,” he said. “You can hop on a train in New York City and get upstate. You can’t do that here.”

Still, Rautzhan was itching to introduce the local community to some thought-provoking contemporary art. The cavernous barn looked like a natural fit, but it has a bit of a “bat problem,” he said. The small cabin, just steps from the farmhouse, was always known as “the little house,” Rautzhan said, an in-law suite that devolved into a place where his uncles gathered to chug beers at night. For decades, it was mostly used as storage.

“When we first moved back here, this looked like an abandoned ‘70s porn set, but it was filled with my grandmother’s knickknacks,” he said.

After tearing out a drop-ceiling to expose raw beams and applying a coat of paint, Rautzhan said he hung “something weird” on the walls and found it worked. He hosted his first show there in August.

On Sunday, several dozen people drove in and out of the farm all day, drinking wine and craft beer. Most were artists and others were instructors from colleges all over Northeastern Pennsylvania. Oldham flew in from Eugene, Ore. One artist, Masaru Suyama, shipped his small paintings to Rautzhan from Japan.

Artist Michael Mahalchick, whose work was on display in the cabin, came in from Brooklyn, but like Rautzhan, grew up in Pottsville. His work focuses on discarded things, like old records and latex masks. One friend and fellow artist said Mahalchick had a “spooky imagination.”

“If there was something like this here, when I was a kid, I would have lost my mind,” Mahalchick said. “I’m so happy that Lance is doing this, because it’s like a little beacon of the alternative.”

Mahalchick’s mother, Eleanor, was there too, beaming. She said she encouraged her son’s offbeat interests, watching him shrug off still lifes and landscapes to root around antique shops and farmer’s markets.

“He was always different and that’s just his nature. He marched to a different tune,” she said “He isn’t afraid to express it.”

Introducing a different tune, starting a conversation around modern art, was the goal for Cabin Contemporary, Rautzhan said. Ideally, some young, budding artists from local schools will make their way there, to see what else the world has to offer. He would have done that, if one were around back then.

“I want to bring something new,” he said. “You can come out here and learn about new cultures.”

“The Devil Made Me Do It” runs through April 30, by appointment only. For more information, visit cabincontemporary.art.