While Van Helsing and Blade slay blood-sucking vampires by night, Hurley resident Nina Isabelle fights “psychic vampires” with her artwork.

According to Isabelle, these entities rob victims of sleep and sanity, leaving them drained and dreary. They can’t be seen in a mirror or elsewhere, Isabelle notes, but we feel them drain our mental life force during the roughest parts of our day.

So how do you kill a psychic vampire? With a giant stake, of course.

The cerebral demon-slaying sculpture will be on display at the Art Life Institute, located at 185 Abeel St. in Kingston, this Saturday, May 1 from 6 to 9 p.m. There, attendees can participate in their own psychic vampire slaying ceremony to exorcise these exhausting pests.

In 1999, Isabelle was an undergraduate student at Westminster College, where she would go on to graduate with a bachelor’s in art with honors. She works with a staggering number of media including painting, video, sculpture, sound, performance and writing. Her work, she says, aims to explore how our five senses drive our actions, reactions and choices we make in both art and life. Isabelle’s work was on display at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City, The Queens Museum and a number of galleries across the globe in her decades-long career.

When 2018 rolled around it was time for her to forge her own artistic space. She founded the Three Phase Center for Collaborative Art Research & Building, 3607 Atwood Road in Stone Ridge. Isabelle said she likes to invite at least four conceptual artists to the space each year. She enjoys filming their artistic process and making small documentaries about the artists to expose their creativity to the public in an easily digestible format.

Isabelle recalls encountering her first psychic vampire at the property she manages, where a young family with a new baby lived. Dangerously close to a house stood a dead pine tree that swayed menacingly in the wind and threatened to crash through the roof nearby. She felt that the family’s life was in her hands.

“I kept calling tree services and nobody was able to do it,” Isabelle explained. “I was just getting really nervous because I couldn't take care of this tree.”

It was around the same time that Isabelle began to delve into the idea of supernatural disturbances while reading British occultist Dion Fortune’s 1930 book Psychic Defense: The Classic Instruction Manual for Protecting Yourself Against Paranormal Attack.

The book offers explanations as to why people feel mentally exhausted when they spend time with certain other people and how energetic other individuals can make them. Isabelle began toying with the idea that we transfer and absorb energy from other people, as well as our environment.

But it was hard for Isabelle to articulate such intangible ideas; she needed a physical reference to symbolize the sensation of emotional parasites and a means to extinguish them. “I need to do something about this sort of psychic vampirism from past relationships, feeling the drain of the pandemic and really looking at the situations in my life,” Isabelle said. “Imagine you could conceptually frame the entity of the pandemic and put it in front of a wooden stake, cleansing the evil energy.”

When she finally found someone to cut down the terrifying pine tree, she sought to reclaim the negative energy that the timber stole. She asked the tree cutters to slice the tree into several 18-foot lengths while she picked out the most handsome chunk of wood. Some of the bark that clung to the side peeled off with ease, but she used an array of grinders, blades and chisels to skin the trunk bare. She then recruited her son to help wield a chainsaw to sharpen one end of the log to a fine point.

“I put a lot of energy into the sculptural object and I imagined that I imbued it with energy with that labor intention, and those calories that I put in,” Isabelle said.

Alongside the sculpture, Isabelle will display a number of photographs and play a soundtrack she curated specifically for this installation. On top of Saturday’s event, Isabelle will host a “mid-month healing session” on May 15 and a closing reception on May 29, both at 9 p.m. Beforehand, folks can sign up to be part of a seven-person healing session before the show begins. Spots are limited, so those interested should email her at Nina@ninaisabelle.com.