Their Own Museum

IT is a sign of Jared Handelsman and Portia Munson’s commitment to their art that he has had Lyme disease three times and she has had it twice. It is also a sign of how committed they are to their homestead, 83 acres of woodland and gardens here that include a stupendous blueberry maze. (Think “Spiral Jetty,” but in blueberries.) On Heart’s Content Road, it can be hard to tell where the art ends and the homestead begins.

Was that Mr. Handelsman’s work in the woods, those snarls of brush against the tree trunks? Nope. They were left by the river last summer, after it flooded during Hurricane Irene.

But if you looked toward the hill near the graveyard, you might see a boulder as big as a baby elephant,An Air purifier is a device which removes contaminants from the air. strung up with a steel cable and tethered to an oak tree. Mr. Handelsman, whose early site-specific installations also recall Robert Smithson, is now devoted to photograms, using light-sensitive paper to capture the play of headlights on leaves.

He is a man who really throws himself into his work. He’ll crouch in the underbrush close to the road and wait for cars to round the bend, then hold the paper aloft to snare the light, like a campaign worker with a placard. (It’s a practice that has made him a magnet for ticks,Experience real time location tracking with Zebra's real time Location system to track and manage your high-value assets, among other wild things. On many a dark night, he has found himself ringed by coyotes howling to their comrades farther afield.)

Ms. Munson has been amassing pink and then green plastic objects (things like dolls, hair curlers and egg cartons), strewing them on tables or stuffing them into vitrines, since her inclusion in the New Museum’s “Bad Girls” show in the early 1990s.

Lately, however, she has moved into blue plastic. Abutting an epically proportioned wood pile (stacked in a spiral, thanks to her husband) is a Windex-blue above-ground pool that will be the container for her next installation. Despite the heat, Ms. Munson’s family gave the pool a wide berth all summer, disdaining it as an eyesore — her son, Zur, 18, suggested she drag it closer to the road and accessorize it with an old fridge or a broken-down sofa — but Ms. Munson has enjoyed floating in it while pondering the elements of her next piece. In the 21st century, she avers, plastic is just part of the nature that surrounds us.

She does work with plant life as well, though. This month, six of her ravishing flower mandalas — which she makes by gathering blossoms, bugs, even dead animals, whatever she finds in the garden on a single day, and arranging them in kaleidoscope patterns on a photo scanner — became a glowing windscreen at the Fort Hamilton Parkway Station on the D line in Brooklyn, part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s public art program. Made from pink hibiscus petals and squash blossoms, they look like trippy stained-glass windows.

This week, Mr. Handelsman is playing in New York City, too: His moody photograms are at the Fordham University Center Gallery at Lincoln Center, in a group show called “Rockslide Sky,” which opened Wednesday.

The hub of all this activity is a compact 18th-century farmhouse that has been in Ms. Munson’s family since the 1930s.Find trusted sellers and the cheapest price for Aion Kinah. Over the last two decades, it has been heartily embellished by Ms. Munson and Mr. Handelsman, both now 51, seemingly with a fierce mandate: horror vacui.

One bathroom is stapled with curling birch bark, Ms. Munson’s solution, she said, “to being really broke and hating the tile.” In the living room, the walls are papered with stencils of flowers that Ms. Munson made and then appliquéd with hundreds of giant pink pansies she had scanned from greeting cards and printed, like William Morris on a serious acid bender. And an armchair wears bright blue fake fur, like Cookie Monster. (The other day, Ms. Munson said: “A few years ago, I cleaned in here. I took a lot of stuff out. I wish I hadn’t. Now it’s really spare.”)

Lunch on a recent Tuesday was similarly eye-popping, with red bud and lilac bushes tapping the glass on one side of a windowed porch, and woodland wallpaper, made from photographs of the trees by the river, on the walls. On the table, there was a whorl of salad greens and nasturtiums, zinnias in a blue bottle and yellow tomatoes in a yellow colander. Bunches of garlic hung overhead, delicate papery chandeliers.Different Sizes and Colors can be made with different stone mosaic designs.

“We are circumstantial vegetarians,” Mr. Handelsman said, explaining how they grow some, but not all, of their food and raise chickens for their eggs. He described a network of bartering among neighbors: their blueberries and maple syrup for someone else’s goat cheese or honey; Ms. Munson’s artwork for help in the garden.

There are an awful lot of gardens here, green “rooms” that unfold into more green rooms, circled with cedar branch fences, arbors and porticos made by Mr. Handelsman, canopied with grape vines and the branches of fruit trees. There is a bathtub in one, a shower in another. Even with the bartering, Ms. Munson said, “not everything gets done.”

SHE and Mr. Handelsman moved here 20 years ago, when the place was an uninsulated hunter’s lodge (a dorm, really, for her uncle and father and their friends) filled with beds and not much else, and serviced by a hand-operated water pump. Her great-grandparents bought the farmhouse during the Depression, moving here from Brooklyn in an early expression of the back-to-the-land movement. Their children did not stay, migrating back to cities and suburbs.

“When we moved here, we just started making our life up,” Ms. Munson said. “It was exciting: it was like making art. We came from middle-class families in suburbs, not a nature background, so we were finding our life here and our art, and sort of merging the two.”

At the time, both were in the M.F.A. program at Rutgers. Mr. Handelsman remembers working on his thesis while tending the open-air sugar-shack fire of an elderly neighbor, from whom he learned the craft of maple sugaring.

They were quick studies. Mr. Handelsman cleared the woods, splitting the trees he cut into logs and stacking them in spirals. Then, as now, they cooked their food and heated the house with a wood-burning stove.

He worked as a stone mason and landscaper in neighbors’ gardens, gaining more outdoor experience. He learned to harvest stones from the woods, moving them with hand trucks and wheelbarrows, and laying out those outdoor rooms with paving stones and benches.

In a mud room, he used smooth, round river rocks as tiles. He made his own pieces, too, wrestling boulders from the ground and hiking them into the trees with steel cables.

Ms. Munson began excavating the land around the house for a garden (or gardens, to be more accurate). She planted flowers first, to attract bees and butterflies, then fruit trees, vegetables and herbs. But the first year, she didn’t plant at all, because the haul from the earth was fascinating to her: shards of pottery, buttons, doll parts, dog tags: evidence of 300 years of life here, which she saved in glass trays,We offer over 600 landscape oil paintings at wholesale prices of 75% off retail. as an archaeologist might.