Goodnight, Springton. There will be no encore.

This post would have made all the sense in the world to have done back in April 2020 when we believed we were simply downsizing, moving, and rebooting. But the fact of the matter is by the close of that month it had become incredibly apparent that things would be much more complicated than that. Anything I would have said then would have been negated over the following several months as the true nature of the situation we had found ourselves in actually started to become clear. Extremely long story extremely truncated: we had already planned to take time off to regroup just as COVID hit and, once masks and vaccines became politicized, and we were forced to face the reality of what that would mean for us in the long term. As high risk individuals we were ostensibly barred from any participation in public life until the end of the pandemic, an end which has never and likely will never come. Once that fact became inescapably apparent, we realized we were not in a good place to simply lick our wounds and get back in the game. In fact the downtime brought with it the realization that we had been playing a game we had never much enjoyed playing in the first place..

While we treasured quite a bit of the experiences and relationships EAM afforded us, the pressures of our own respective health issues, near constant police harassment, weirdly predatory behavior by some of our “fellow” businesses, being used as a storage shed for forgotten art, getting caught between personal beefs within the scene, and a rash of shows that were so intolerable that Sherry and I earnestly discussed leaving in order to preserve our own sense of self-respect, were all simply too much to continue to muscle through for the sake of a handful of students and well wishers, no matter how treasured. In short we were never a good fit for this town, or an art studio frankly, and the pandemic merely drew that into sharp focus.

So that’s it. No more classes, no more shows, no more weird little curated trinkets, no more EAM. I hope everyone who means well is living well, or well enough, as the case may be.

-Asellus “Asa” Claudum