Nayland Blake on “Haunt”: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre at Art Omi | ARTnews On View
In this installment of “On View,” Nayland Blake walks us through “Haunt”: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre at Art Omi in upstate New York. The show opens in a visitors center that Blake describes as welcoming you “into the world of a character named Victorya Spectre,” filled with artifacts Victorya made and objects that evoke her presence.
“Victorya represents for me an homage to people that I would see on the streets of New York and San Francisco, as I was growing up and as I was a young artist, who had made themselves into a kind of street art,” Blake says. For Blake, she is a way to explore “notions of queer presence, of aging, of power that we might find in the overlooked.”
Five signals placed around the property lead out to the main installation, “Haunt,” Blake’s first outdoor installation. Asked to make something outdoors, Blake began imagining what would happen if Victorya “became a kind of mysterious cryptid figure like Bigfoot or the Mothman.” “Haunt” is the environment she is most often seen around, built to evoke abandoned amusement park rides, roadside fruit stands, and the constructed ruins of English gardens.
“A big part of what I hope that people take from my work is the opportunity to exercise their own imaginations in relationship to the things that they see,” Blake says. “I can’t wait to see what sort of stories people make up about it.”
“Haunt”: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre is on view in the Newmark Gallery at Art Omi through January 10, 2027, and in the Sculpture & Architecture Park through fall 2030.
Video by Christopher Garcia Valle
Footage of Victorya Spectre: “unfounded footage” by Sam Penn/Commissioned by Art Omi/Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
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Video “Nayland Blake on “Haunt”: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre at Art Omi | ARTnews On View” was uploaded on 07/20/2026 by ARTnews Youtube channel.