Although McGill says she’s heard people connect the abandoned castle to an alleged 18th-century king, the castle is in fact from the arms dealer, Francis Bannerman, who built it at the turn of the 20th century and “ stuffed it full of armor and cannons and gunpowder.” In 1920, the powder house exploded-and then, nearly 50 years later, “a fire with flames 200 feet high devoured Bannerman’s warehouses, lighting up the Hudson Valley, leaving only the walls we see today.”Ī "ghost image," as the artist puts it, with her own new photo of the castle ruins superimposed over an older image of the castle when it was still fully standing, before it exploded and later caught fire. During research with collaborator Sam Anderson, McGill found that the land links the histories of the Lenape indigenous tribe, bootleggers and “ an eccentric arms dealer,” among others. McGill’s work is inspired in part by the island’s strange history. For the next two years, they’ll glow for two hours every evening, fading out one by one, the same way they turn on. Slender poles between 40 and 80 feet long keep the artist-born stars in the sky. The piece, called Constellation, is a celestial scene with solar-powered LEDs inside hand-blown glass globes. The stars come not from the Milky Way but from Melissa McGill, an artist who lives near the island in Beacon, New York, and who is about to unveiled her latest installation. This summer, new stars will light up the island one by one at sunset, drawing those nearby to look anew at the old, mysterious land and its decaying estate. Pollepel, about 60 miles north of Manhattan in the Hudson River, and also called Bannerman’s Island, is about 20,000 years old and known today for the abandoned castle rising up from its ancient rock. Starting this weekend, 17 new stars will illuminate Pollepel Island each night.
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