Aug 13, 2018 — There's a string of islands that run across Lake Champlain from the top of New York State to Vermont, and on one causeway, there's an old motel called the Sandbar Inn. It was built in the 1950s and closed in the early 2000s. Now it sits empty, dilapidated, and it looks a little haunted.

But for three nights this summer, it came to life. A group called Overnight Projects invited artists to use the motel and its rooms for an exhibition called "From Away."

Zach Hirsch had a chance to see it before it disappeared.

"From Away," the exhibition by Overnight Projects, took place in late July on Grand Isle, Vermont. Photo: Zach Hirsch

It’s a breezy Friday evening in late July. The clouds over Lake Champlain are half pink, half ominous grey.

The Sandbar Inn is a long, low, faded white building, surrounded by scrubby grass and trees, and it’s weirdly magnetic. There’s a consent form – something about the hazards of an abandoned building. I sign without reading.

The first room I visit is dark, except for a beat-up, reddish lamp. There’s a couple of reel-to-reel tape machines, amplifiers and an old, hand-made wooden speaker that’s more like a crate with an animal inside. There’s this churning sound coming out of it.

Impromptu wind chimes, part of an installation by Charmaine Wheatley. Photo: Zach Hirsch

Sound artist Wren Kitz put all this together using field recordings, "of mostly wind and me using the inn as a musical instrument."

"I just had a microphone, and it strapped to my side, and started walking through the inn. Anything that I found that made an interesting noise, I kind of would stay for a while and check it out. A lot of the recording is my hand, going through, peeling paint on the walls," Kitz says.

"In the middle of the inn there’s this room that’s the electrical control, or once was. And there’s all these breaker boxes and big switches, and I had quite a time in there."

Part of sound artist Wren Kitz's setup. Photo: Zach Hirsch

Meanwhile, the bathtub in Room 29 is overflowing with dead leaves, and the shadows of grass, berries, and tiny flowers are projected on the walls. Room 24 has a giant, wooden nest with a TV screen in the middle, showing video of an osprey flying over the lake. An unmarked room on the end is being used as a walk-in pinhole camera.

Abbey Meaker is one of the people running things here. She’s director of Overnight Projects, which does art shows in abandoned and non-traditional places. She says the Sandbar Inn was on her dream list for years. "The light reflects off the lake and has a luminous quality, which I think contrasts nicely with the derelict quality of the remaining building," Meaker says, adding that these shows are meant to reach a wide audience. "People who may not be inclined to go to an art exhibition might be motivated to see a space they wouldn’t normally have access to," she says.

Visitors explore McCullough's muslin corridor. Photo: Zach Hirsch

That approach is definitely working. The highway goes right by the Sandbar Inn and new people keep getting out of their cars to wander around.

Almost everyone is immediately drawn to Room 23. Conceptual artist Angus McCullough turned it into a narrow, "dreamlike passage." You can see from the roadside, straight through to the lake.

"[It’s] been transformed into a muslin corridor. And this fabric just has this billowy quality, and it becomes a passageway from a door on one side to a door on the other. It just allows you to feel the wind that would come through the building, that would be coming through this field if the building weren’t here," McCullough says.

Angus McCullough's osprey nest. Photo: Zach Hirsch

In Room 21, Charmaine Wheatley made wind chimes out of these shiny, tin discs she found here. "There’s a reflection from the wind chimes that dances around the room and you’ll see these – it’s almost like fireflies buzzing around in here," she says, like a low-budget disco ball.

Director Abbey Meaker says this isn’t just for the public. It’s also for the artists to experiment.

Mary Zompetti projected plant materials onto the walls. Photo: Zach Hirsch

"That was what was mainly interesting to me," Wren Kitz says, "is being able to come up here, by myself, and just walk in to this absurd place and use an electrical room as a drum set for a while and have no one tell me that I’m doing anything wrong. That was cool."

This art show is already over. It was quick and ephemeral – that was the point. The Sandbar Inn is back to being an abandoned, empty building.

But not completely empty. Now it has a little bit of magic in it.