Inland retreat

Every summer since 2005, a 500-year-old former mill in rural south Bohemia has turned into a creative hotbed, attracting artists from all over the world to create works inspired by the genius loci and also to encourage children's creativity at an art-oriented summer youth camp. Since 2007, these artists also have a local exhibition venue, Galerie Califia - named for the mythical goddess who guarded the gold on the shores of the Pacific Ocean - housed in a Renaissance chateau in nearby Horažďovice. Both are run by the artist Barbara Benish, a native Californian with Czech roots who settled in the Šumava region in the 1990s.

This summer, this picturesque corner of south Bohemia became something of a "little California," as an unprecedented number of professional and budding artists from the Golden State converged there for the summer session at Art Mill.

Toward the end of this year's session, a group show opened featuring works by artist-in-residence Jill Giegerich, Daniel Camacho, Javier Orcoray, Gina Farkas, Tim Kopra, Martina Kocmanová and guest artist Anna Munter. The title of the show, Empire, was loosely inspired by the century-old name for the area where this year's artist-in-residence is a professor at the University of California Riverside: the "Inland Empire," a region that prospered in the late 19th century from its citrus, dairy and wine-making industries, and whose agricultural splendor has given way to suburban sprawl.

The theme of empire also has a local context, relating to Bohemia's history as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and then part of the Soviet bloc after World War II, which Ronald Reagan so famously called the "Evil Empire." The group show provides a context for examining the concept of empire across the centuries and continents. It additionally considers the demise of empires in different parts of the world.

When Giegerich arrived in south Bohemia from California, she decided to work with whatever materials Benish had on hand at the mill, which happily for this artist included large sheets of handmade paper. All her works in the show are fresh pieces created since late July. She describes them as a vision of what a post-imperial world might look like. One room in the gallery is filled with drawings and paintings that are characterized by free-flowing energy and creativity, symbolized by several drawings of a simplified torch handle that the artist placed beneath the wall-mounted lights lining the gallery room.

Another artist who taught at Art Mill this summer is Daniel Camacho, who is an activist involved in agrarian issues in his native Mexico and in his current home of northern California. Inside the gallery, a large room is devoted to his work, which also offers an antidote to vestiges of imperialism: a colorful, folk-inspired vision of harmony between the earth, celestial bodies and humankind. Brightly painted skulls make reference to the joyous celebration of the cycle of life and death on the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead, when the living feast with ancestral spirits.

Tim Kopra, an art student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has a large sculpture that strongly recalls Vladimir Tatlin's unrealized Monument to the Third International. In contrast to Tatlin's paean to modernity, Kopra's spiraling sculpture is a rustic helix of weathered wood slabs that casts a mutating pattern of light and shadow all over the room.

A small wooden box mounted on the wall near the gallery's entrance by Gina Farkas, another student at UCSC, contains a small ball of tightly woven straw hemmed in on all sides by rusting nails. This unassuming piece presents a universal concept of imperialism that seems unlikely to ever disappear, even as larger political empires crumble: the infinite "little empires" human beings construct to maintain control of others.

Envisioning a post-imperial world, Giegerich offers one possible path: Playing on the Czech word for "post," po, and putting a playful twist on the tactic of divide and conquer with the word "empire," she creates the hopeful word "po-em," leaving the second part of that word a nonsensical construct that quickly fades from memory. A lasting impression of this show, however, is left by the strong sense of international community created at the mill and at Galerie Califia this summer.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com