group exhibit
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Nadema Agard
My work as an artist has an individual style with a cosmic subject. My pieces, often metaphors for the relationships between the sacred feminine and masculine, are devotional pieces made in reverence to the earth, sky, sun, moon and stars --- all the creative and regenerative forces of the universe. With a global agenda from a native perspective, my art is the interconnection of myself as woman, mother, native person, spiritual being and warrior.
Nava Atlas
My current and recent works are an exploration of universal frustrations common to the inner lives of women—our insecurity about reaching higher goals; lack of time and focus; the difficulty of reconciling our worldly ambitions with self-expectations of being perfect partners and mothers. Combining collage and often drawing with found objects, embellished with text, my aim is to explore these subjects with a sense of humor as well as my affinity with the absurd.
Paola Bari
My porcelain pieces are painted using over glaze colors applied with an European close medium, luster and precious metals such as gold, silver and platinum. Once painted, each piece is required to be fired around 1400-1450F degrees to make the colors permanent on the china surface. Many pieces need to be fired multiple times, depending on the motif and on the variety of the material used.
Rimer Cardillo
Birds of Gardiner deals with the concept of the north and south habitats of the Americas. I depart from my personal experiences that take place in the landscape of New York's Hudson Valley and in the Amazon rain forest.
The series is composed of images taken from birds that die flying into the large windows of our modern constructions. These creatures do not distinguish between the image reflected in the glass and the real landscape, a confusion that takes their life.
The images are prints and paintings at the same time. It is a process of translating from three dimensions to two dimensions. Photographs of the wax casts are first manipulated on the computer. From these revised and modified images, acetates are produced for the silkscreens — each image uses two or three different screens.
Each print is built up of many different layers of screened information. Later layers often cover up much of the information underneath, but it makes a difference in the final print.
Sometimes I think a print is lost, but then I screen one more layer and it comes back, but in a way that is different than if each one of the previous layers were not beneath the last.
These spots with bird shapes, denounce the extermination of humans, animals and forests, destructions that we experience in our rapidly changing, insecure world.
Dick Crenson
In the mid-nineteenth century, photographers had to go about with a wagonload of bulky equipment. They developed their pictures of wet glass plates in darkroom tents on location. The twenty-first century has the point and shoot, the digital camera, the photophone, and Photoshop. Everyone has the tools to snap a “great shot” without any knowledge of composition, or lighting, or technique.
So what’s left?
Some photographers have retreated back to pin hole photography, others embrace everything that’s available. I think that the technology doesn’t matter because it is the content of what you do and not how you do it that’s important.
Margaret Crenson
For many years, I have been using a palette knife and oil paint, recently adding wax medium for greater texture. Although my work is representational, my focus is on light, shadow, and composition rather than accurate detail.
George Donskoj
Tradition and ritual are very important to me. My approach is to go back into time in a very physical way drawing upon the techniques, influences and processes of art. Traditional materials have always held a satisfaction that I hope to translate to the viewer.
Nancy Dosnkoj
What I explore in my photographs is the dichotomy between the absurd and the sublime.
Staats Fasoldt
Staats is Vice President of the Woodstock School of Art’s Board of Directors and an active member of the Woodstock Artist’s Association. He moved to Ulster County from Albany with his wife Eileen in 1976 to attend the MFA program at SUNY New Paltz. and after graduating in 1978, began teaching Watercolor Painting at the Woodstock School of Art. His popular Hudson River Painting Workshop’s continues to attract artists to Woodstock each year. They climb the heights of majestic Katterskill Falls and tramp the fields of Olana in search of sublime views of the Valley. Staats’ paintings are interpretations of nature that stress spontaneity as method.
Jim Fawcett
Up until recently I was the kind of person who, when he went to select a board from the lumber pile, would choose a piece that was only as good as it needed to be. I’d save my most precious boards, the ones with the most meaning, for later. Now I can see that I have more lumber than I will ever use and it’s time to make plans to use the good stuff.
Lynne Friedman
"The poetic grandeur of nature is expressed eloquently...creates work that embodies the emotive properties..." Artists in the 1990's, Manhattan Arts
Chris Gonya
My black and white charcoal work is the direct result of a new area of exploration for me and my artwork. These studies of dense forests and trees are an attempt to combine a purely abstract style with the local landscape. I have for many years been known to produce abstract compositions often utilizing elements of collage. At the same time my interest in representational painting was often expressed in the form of landscapes produced occasionally as a means to explore nature.
Recently I have been attempting to combine the two, very polarized styles, into one cohesive form of expression. These black and white studies represent this new direction in its most fundamental and primitive stages. The raw elements of charcoal and paper allow me to examine the basic design elements of composition and space in the purest black and white representation. The observation of nature allows me to examine new spaces and relationships in a more organic manner dictated by the random chaos of wild growth. Energy, pattern and abstract generalizations are as much a theme in these early studies as the trees themselves. It is my objective to continue this direction and expand on the exploration to new media and styles yet to be discovered.
Jan Harrison
Jan Harrison's paintings, sculptures, and installations involve empathy with the animal nature as it relates to human existence and the psyche of the world. She speaks in a language, Animal Tongue, which has been included as part of sculptural installations. Her work was included in the exhibition Animal.Anima.Animus, which opened in Finland and was exhibited at PS1. Arcana Mundi, a book spanning twenty years of her work, was published in 2001 by Station Hill/Barrytown, Ltd., New York. In 2003, a chapter regarding her work was included in the book, In The Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art, by Linda Weintraub, published by D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., New York, N.Y.
Wayne Montecalvo
My work has always been a combination of things; whether combing materials, images, people, traditions, disciplines, personalities, situations, environments, etc. I’ve recently renewed my interest in figurative work through paintings, prints, and video with a fascination on how a person is viewed in an invented setting or context. I like to think of the work as fictional portrayals of human situations.
The video entitled “Clown!” is an ongoing narrative that investigates some of the more quirky and disturbing aspects of human nature and contemporary society. This video is something that I made because I was excited about the idea, even though I realize that it is not for everyone. I think about it as a kind of moving sketchbook from which I can cull still works. And as in a sketchbook, I plan to add parts as the diary continues, introducing more characters and dialogue with new fictional situations.
Laura Moriarty
I think about the layered encaustic paintings I make as sites. Excavating their surfaces, I compress the warm, pigmented wax into forms that resemble weird agates, geodes, bones and shards. While literally pushing the boundaries of sculpture and painting, this process can be seen as a play on plate tectonics, where everything is continually drifting apart and crashing together, layering one episode on top of another, often in eccentric ways. Geologists know that rocks can tell stories if you know how to read them. I follow a similar principle in painting.
My work has evolved into something that might best be described as forensic painting, or faux-archaeology. The studio is a stand-in for the laboratory, where I am constantly experimenting and chasing down clues. The gallery is the place where I display my results, often working with subtexts that refer to the way museums collect and display fragments lifted out of time. By comparing human to geologic time, I draw far-fetched parallels between the natural sciences and my own process-oriented compulsions.
Franc Palaia
In 1990 I began a series investigating photographic illumination with sculptural forms. Early pieces were translucent color images housed in found domestic and industrial recycled containers, such as crates, suitcases, auto parts, shopping bags, toys, appliances, etc., usually evoking political and/or humorous and ironic themes.
My current works combine back-lit digital transparencies or Duratrans with partially eradicated mirrors to create a play of direct and reflected light. The images are panoramic spans and arcades of ancient Roman aqueducts, architecture, American bridges and viaducts of different eras. The works range from 2 to 8 feet horizontally and vertically. The photo-mirrors are illuminated from behind and project off the wall where fluorescent and incandescent light passes through the mirrors. This allows the viewer to see two distinctly disparate images simultaneously, classic Roman architecture along with their own reflections as well as reflected background imagery.
The ancillary light from other parts of the room creates continuous mercurial animation and interplay with the viewer. Light is an integral part of the pieces because it simulates the warm Mediterranean sunlight and the deliberately crude removal of the mirror backing enhances the antiquity of the subject matter.
An ongoing concern in my work has been to present photography in a variety of unconventional ways and to juxtapose exotic worldly images with prosaic consumer objects. The modern mirrors and lights together with the rustic architectural imagery convey the contrasting irony of old versus new, purchased and found, high the and low tech. My intentions are to expand the parameters of photography which includes innovation, materials, technique, concept, and presentation.
Joyce Pommer
My paintings evolve out of my subconscious in a free flowing process that expresses beauty and happiness. I do not start with a preconceived idea or plan. The space comes alive through the colors and shapes which work their way into the piece - often by collage of diverse papers onto a surface of canvas or board. Spontaneity and movement are important as new images appear. Some of the pictorial spaces become busy and congested while others are more vast and serene. These paintings are unified by the materials and the process. Placing different colors next to each other presents a new direction and movement in the painting. I see something different - a new path or a deeper space. Each completed vision portrays a sensitivity and fragility along with a strong visual image. The image is abstract but the feeling is solidified. Although I perceive my own image as the painting emerges, I also want the viewer to create his own experience from the materials I have presented.
Tom Sarrantonio
My paintings constitute a visible record of intimate experiences in contact with the natural world. I hope they communicate a sense of quiet contemplation, active attention, and an undefined longing. In particular, my recent work has focused on the transitory effects of light and shadow and the attendant metaphors they suggest. They project a process of perception that is both rational and mysterious, sensual and spiritual, temporal and timeless. I offer them as templates for meditation.
Judith Sigunick
Through my work as an artist I have discovered a real purpose in connecting the ideas that impact and inform my work. Take elephants, for example, which are about what they look like, how they form social groups, their potential for human emotion and communication, the long standing crisis they face as victims of hunting and land development and their status as a keystone species. Elephants are also about me and you. I try not to look past the elephants, but through them. Usually, my work becomes unrecognizable from what I thought it would be in the first place.
Philip Sigunik
When I broke my neck (a car accident), everything changed. My immediate environment became temporarily populated by saints and samaritans, all of whom contributed to my ultimate recovery, and I came to understand that for me, time not spent painting was time lost forever. My efforts at picture making became directed toward capturing the experience of beauty more than toward its reproduction. Painting became an adventure and a process of discovery and growth, as well as an attempt to communicate personal experience in a manner accessible to others. (Not “easy”, not even necessarily representational, just not so defined that there is no room for any vision but mine.)
In any case, I expect the nucleus of the rest of my life to be the making of “art” (whatever that is) and everything else to be peripheral to that involvement.
Raymond J. Steiner
I have long been opposed to written “artist’s statements” that attempt to explain, define, or describe work since it is my belief that art ought to “speak” in its own language. As to subject matter, I paint landscapes because interacting with our natural habitat both pleases and informs me. As to process, I mostly use palette knives in an effort to avoid falling into the bad habit of over-fussy attention to detail that I find myself resorting to when I use brushes. I invite you to view my results. If my paintings do not engage you in silent communication, then they have failed as art.
Harry Tabak
My current work explores the use of found stones and wood in creating mysterious landscapes and animated compositions. My earlier work represented a social commentary on the environmental issue of toxic waste. My new works are more elusive in theme, but still very much connected to my earlier works, and my affinity to nature and the environment.
Carl Van Brunt
I have been making digital art for about 25 years. Before that my focus was painting in acrylic. The Ovals” which were made this year are recent explorations of abstraction. As such, they represent a departure from much of the work I had been doing in 2003-2004. That work contains representational elements and has specific subject matter. This new work is non-objective in the sense that I have no preconceived notions of any kind other than to perform an improvised exploration of form and color. I say “perform,” because I think of my process as similar to recording jazz. A musician starts with a set of chords or modes and a repertoire of riffs developed over the years and from this he or she creates something unpredictable and new in the moment. The tape in the studio captures this moment. Likewise, I have my shapes and colors. I have my riffs. I start with a blank screen and I let it rip. The computer records the moment for better or worse. I keep the “takes” I find interesting, I zap the rest. Here are a few “keepers.”
Maija Veidi
Maija creates drawings using charcoal.
Marlene Wiedenbaum
I push pigment
to blend color
and contrast shapes
with my fingers
sometimes
I fall into a form
and carefully climb out
through the shadows.
I draw lines
to describe a world
I see and sense
with my heart
sometimes
I lose the critic
and gain the confidence
to open my eyes.
I build layers
to intensify an image,
a form, shape or color
I don’t always understand
(and) sometimes
the resolve
stays with me
like a moment from childhood.
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art
Elisa Pritzker
Studio & Gallery
