Nov 9 – Dec 14, 2024
Welcome Home
Group Exhibition
Opening Reception
Sat, Nov 9, 4-7pm
Artist Statements
Alan Adin
I have an idea and I make it into a thing. I consider myself a maker of things.
Fern Apfel
I am a still-life painter, however, instead of painting familiar and traditional subjects, I paint pictures of paper. This confuses some people because they believe my paintings are collaged, but in fact they are not.
Each letter or piece of paper is painted with multiple layers of acrylic paint. I do all the fine detail work with archival pens. I work from real letters and memorabilia that I have gathered over many years and from all over the world.
I find great beauty in these old letters. They are nostalgic reminders of things that no longer exist and histories of bygone times. In old letters we find loved ones, parents, old friends, and our old selves.
Space and color are key elements in these minimal compositions, as the ephemera transform into abstract shapes.
Nudging the boundaries between language, painting and abstraction, my paintings present life not as then versus now, but as an inescapable circle of time and memory.
Although the human figure is absent from my work, my art is deeply rooted in the human condition.
Onaje Benjamin
As a self-taught documentary photographer, I have sought out spaces where I could expand my understanding of the artform and how captured images can impact public policy and be a vehicle to empower historically marginalized individuals and communities. I perceive my journey as “Looking through the Lens of Eldership.” I choose to create monochrome images because they allow me to focus on shapes, textures, contrast and composition without the distraction of color. My images challenge the viewer to explore life’s complexities void of the seduction of color.
My pieces for the theme “Welcome Home” are representations of spaces I associate with where I find peace of mind and symbolize a destination/place where I feel I have arrived and no longer have to be in search of a place to rest. They are structural and environmental markers which ground me to a community which holds the physical site where I feel safe and connected to family – my home.
My photography is an extension of my relationship with people, places and things. Home is a universal concept. As a historically marginalized person, my perception of home is multidimensional and extends beyond the confines of the physical location in which I reside. It possesses a cultural and familial legacy from which my spirit and ancestors were torn-Africa.
Lauren Bergman
In this new collection of paintings entitled The Code Red Series, I am focused on issues surrounding climate change. My work as a painter explores female identity, the vulnerability of wildlife and children, and the fragility of our world among other broad cultural shifts. Growing up, my mother was a working model as well as a feminist, inspiring me to delve into the conflicts and complexities of female identity. My paintings reside at the juncture of myth and social realism. Through a language of culturally specific symbols, I probe the loss of societal optimism and the ongoing irresolution of feminist issues such as sexuality versus objectification and acquiescence versus empowerment. The paintings court irony as playful imagery and inner narratives confront the conflicting expectations of contemporary culture and the intricate ways in which we as women form our identities.
I am commenting on our own cultural glorifications as well as on how our political and cultural landscape is shifting. I employ a personal iconography to question our imminent future; the world sliding closer and closer to global crises, an environment on the verge of collapse, an economy in which the disparity between rich and poor is ever widening, and how Earth is threatened by terrorism and nuclear holocaust. These works reflect not only my fears, but also my hopes for a course-correction; a groundswell of change that will rein in a more equitable and sustainable future.
Stacy Bogdonoff
I make two- and three-dimensional art using mixed media. I most often use textiles, fiber, and paper, sometimes acetate, film, wire, silk, rust, and duct tape.
All my work, regardless of the media, final form, process, or technique is an exploration of “Home and Shelter” and how it changes and morphs as we age and move through life. I explore aging, illness, loss, mortality, and fragility in every piece. Home, safety, shelter, and rest are primal needs and yet, they’re never fixed or stable.
My art is time consuming. I often work on several pieces and series simultaneously. I sometimes work in small components, bringing them together at the end. I am always inspired by non-traditional, often industrial materials, and stumbled upon techniques.
Being an artist is at the core of my identity, and everything I take in comes out in my art. I move through my world and observe, serve, consume, and produce, always conscious of noting the moment, recording the change, cherishing the fleeting, and valuing the present.
I will leave my mark with my art.
Emily Carvajal
I grew up in Manhattan on the bustling, multi-cultural Upper West Side. Both of my parents worked in Theater Arts, and our neighborhood was home to many visual artists and musicians. I attended the Art Students League on 57th street in Manhattan as a child, then continued at the Fiorello Laguardia High School of Music and Art, and majored in Fine Arts at the City College of New York.
The sounds, culture and multitude of characters that I interacted with on a daily basis have greatly influenced my choice of subject as a painter. My work consists of studies of the human condition, the duality of separateness and isolation vs our innate connectedness to each other both physically and emotionally. I am particularly interested in understanding the experiences expressed by women in their work. As women, our choices of subject, medium, color and style are influenced by both our individual and group perceptions of our environments and the way we are regarded within them. Through the eyes, the set of the face, the posture or the gesture, I seek to connect my own truths with those of my subjects.
I work predominantly with oils on canvas and now live in Germantown N.Y.
Collin Douma
I got so excited by this open call that I went on another deepdive. Arm deep the trinket drawer, waist deep in the basement boxes, head deep into some old memories.
Themes began to emerge: living at home, homes away from home, the path to and from home, courage to own a home, memories of lost relatives at home, not knowing where home truly is.
As did souvenirs from home. I combined the elements and have created something unique.
Das Elkin
Vivid colors, the eerie, and ridiculous; I bring my interdimensional visions to life through mask, sculpture, 2D art, and AV.
Mary Elwin
Painting is my passion. Local landscapes of the Hudson Valley and still lifes of flowers and special objects in my surroundings are my primary “models”.
I work to express a sense of romanticism in my paintings while creating a feeling of life and substance in my subjects.
Maya Englehardt
I’m interested most in how the process feels, and whether the truth of a moment is buoyed up and diluted, or real and uncertain. This usually dictates what materials I use and how. Some materials sit around until the time is right. Some materials I collect, not knowing how to use them, just because they seem interesting. The meeting of these opportunities, my emotion, and whatever technical experience I have create a moment. The most rewarding experiences through this process usually involve a discovery of some kind, whether it be in the material I use or spiritually.
Most of my work pinpoints a time or experience in my life; drawn naturally towards nature, sound, saturation, and texture. There tends to also be a search for a freedom (not escape) from
recurring themes or stories of oppression and generational trauma, as well as money and power dynamics I’ve witnessed or experienced first hand that mirror what I see globally.
My most recent pieces are very personal – unpacking generational stories as well as current familial struggles. Some of my pieces draw from photos from my childhood, while others are spawned from an experience through music or conversation that push the emotional process along in some way. Coupled with experiences traveling over the last 2 years, it’s an interesting reflective and futuristic time.
I now work in Upstate NY, finishing and collecting the work I’ve made over the last 5 years.
Maureen Gates
In my youngest years, home was a transient place. My father was in the Air Force and we moved around many times. It was always my desire to find a place and live there for a long time. When I first purchased the property that became my home for decades, there were many very young and small pine trees in one section. Living there so long, the trees have grown into a forest of 35 foot pine trees. I often hike and bike through the trails that I have created there. “Pine Tree Forest” gives me the feeling of home among the trees in the pine scented woods.
As an early riser, I enjoy many sunrises and occasional full moons in the early predawn hours. This is a favorite time for me to stroll around my property. During an early morning walk, I planned to photograph the full moon over the fields. With perfect timing, a car drove by illuminating the road in the beautiful scene that unfolded before my eyes and captured through my lens. “Moonlight” was the result of planning and being there at the right moment when the car drove into my view.
Working with light, shadow and form, I prefer to use the tonality of black and white to capture the beauty of the piece of the world that I live in. I feel at “Home” in the forest and fields that are my neighborhood. Being a photographer for decades, I feel at home with a camera in my hand composing and creating images.
A lifelong love of black and white photography is a medium that I frequently work in with different media, papers, films and fabrics.
Dan Goldman
Home, or as it is called on my VRBO page, The Hudson Valley Artist Sanctuary. “Home” is my sanctuary, where I lay my head down to rest and put the day behind me. It is a time of great peace, as is the morning when I wake up.
My faithful companion and best friend Gus feels the same way as I do, and it is common for us to fall asleep and wake up together. When this happens, and the sunlight is just right, we make photographs together. These are just a few of the many I continually make of Gus and I since moving into my HOME 12 years ago
Josepha Gutelius
Chaos, mess, contradiction, conflict — I paint to connect with all of it: the bad and good news we’re bombarded with, the eco-disasters, the general socio-political idiocracy — they live in my studio, they thrive — ghosts.
Shape-shifters. They blend past, present, future— along with a lot of visual puns. Painting is my better world. Not ideal, but the world of mysterious elsewhere. There’s scant traces of painterliness. I use fluid acrylics, watercolor pencils, ink, and a lot of paper towels soaked with isopropyl alcohol to smooth the surface.
I work on the floor on my knees. I’m thinking opposites attract.
One painting leads me to another and there’s a group conversation that transforms one isolated work into a panoramic synergy. I seek out iconic imagery that resonates with anything I can’t control. Something beyond me.
Fragments.
Whatever is worn-down, broken, I’m patching together.
Memories, day-dreams, nightmares.
Len Jenkin
My works are narratives, stories hidden and obvious at once. They often include language as well as images. I use acrylics, collage, oil sticks, house paint, found objects, canvas. I’m a painter of the imagination and the American scene.
Roxie Johnson
My passion for art embraces an ongoing, in-depth conversation with an existential world of constant change, decay and renewal.
I seek an intimate, thought-provoking imagery that explores the integration and decomposition of our natural and man-made environment. Focused on abstracted form, surface tension, transparency and depth, I invent complex spatial environments where apparent randomness and disorder suggest an organization happening on a different dimensional level.
Regardless of medium, the repetitive employment of a layering, scraping, erasure and reconstructive technique remains pivotal in my approach. Meditative and cathartic, an inexplicable sense of mystery lies there, providing a process through which both chaos and order are able to co-exist and cooperate. This is where I am reminded of our shared humanity,
and rediscover the beauty in vulnerability, and the resilience of human spirit.
Chong Kang
I paint what is in my present frame of reference with respect to the past.
The environment I exist in is the inspiration. Living in Saugerties year-round, surrounded by the
woods, fields and the magnificent sky has been a great source along with my travels to Korea and Japan. There’s a balance between the landscapes of Hudson Valley and East Asia. I’m intrigued with the duality of the organic forms found in nature and the conceptualized shapes and symbols of the East.
The paintings are from a series I started over ten years ago. It is an ongoing series. The paintings are done with Vasari oils on linen primed with rabbit skin glue and lead paint. The technique is inspired by the Italian Baroque masters, such as Caravaggio. My attempt at using a classical method was to provoke a ritualist narrative in a Korean still-life painting. The surreal effect of objects existing without a place or time evokes displaced people.
The objects symbolize familiarity yet are no longer significant, yet echo within me
Sarah Katz
I like to work with my hands and to tell stories. My work is both figurative and literary, in the sense of telling a story. I make reference to sculptural traditions that can be traced back to the small figurative sculptures made by Meissen, Hummel and other iconic images drawn from cartoons and heroic sculpture, but on a smaller scale. The raw clay shaped into these figures, sometimes combined with other materials, and the stories they tell, create different layers of meaning and interpretation, which speaks to who we are to each other and to ourselves.
I like to work in a series and explore different aspects of a subject matter.
I made The Children series during the media frenzy around the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. I was thinking about how odd it was that in Nazi Germany, figures of idealized childhood became so popular at a time when actual children were being marched off to death camps. The nun who originated them said that in times of trouble, people are cheered by these kinds of images. She herself suffered persecution by the Nazis because she was Catholic.
The Frogs is a pure fantasy that grew out of thoughts on the unruly nature of sexuality. In the original story, the wild and slithery frog is changed, by a kiss, into a benevolent, dutiful administrator. In my story, I raise the possibility that though he remains a frog, and he is alarming, the maiden finds him lovable anyway.
Phat Girl/Thin Girl and Four Women, came about because I had been to the Barnes, which is full of nudes, exclusively by men. I wanted to portray the female nude in a way that showed her as she is to herself, rather than an object of desire or a landscape.
Each series has a subject matter, but when I do the work, I turn off the chatter and let the subject inform the process in an organic way. Lately, I have been combining pottery techniques with modeling techniques. I’m working on a series of Sentinels. They are protective figures with human and animal aspects. I see them as protectors in an increasingly dangerous world.
Suki (Shey) Kimok
My work is a collection of experiences from my life and things that inspire me. My inspiration comes from the people and the world around me. It is constantly changing and growing as I do.
David Klein
The true home is the center of our being. We experience that center through the associations we attach to it. That may be people. That may be a place. The relationships we use to define ourselves. The history of our lives, our labor, our daily tasks, our interactions with others, all will be identified with and attached to locale. Sometimes the locale itself presents life challenges and our perseverance forms our identity. All new places represent a frontier. These works explore how places and people define each other.
Virginia Mallon
“There is no foreign land. It is the traveler only that is foreign.”- Robert Louis Stevenson
A photograph, discovered in early 2021, launched a journey of discovery into my immediate family and my ancestors. Their story began in the late 1800s, when an Irish immigrant family left their home seeking sanctuary. They arrived on America’s shore fleeing the “Great Hunger” only to find themselves caught up in the violent end of the Civil War.
This series is about what we now consider home, with portraits of large families who lived hard, heartbreaking, and harrowing lives. Each generation plagued with trauma, abuse, death, and addiction. Although I did not know of their existence until 2021, I immediately recognized the faces of these ghosts as one of my own.
This body of work uses both traditional and not so traditional portraiture to come to terms with a secret legacy growing from Celtic roots.
Karen Maloof
As a photographer turned painter, capturing light and shadow to bring the viewer where my
curiosity has led me has always been my ultimate challenge. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between a structure and its surroundings encourages me to conceptualize what stories can be told about a place. I question what is the character of the inhabitants reflected by a structure, who walked through the door, the laughter, the tears? The scene is set to imagine the answers. The phrase, “if walls could talk”, lurks in the back of my mind while I paint.
Although I consider my work to be in the realism tradition, I alter what I see to accentuate an
emotional response. Composition, contrast of light and color are important considerations and are manipulated to strengthen the feeling derived by a focal point. I use both traditional oil and water based oil paint while painting en plein air (outside). These painting studies are used for my studio paintings, as well as value studies, reference photographs and my memory. Inspired by Richard Schmidt, Edward Hopper and Berthe Morisot, I continue to learn techniques to enhance my vision.
Elin Menzies
The context for my current work is rooted in the seemingly disparate areas of ancient mythology and scientific research on interspecies and intra species communication that has gained momentum in recent years. Although most research is done with primates, there is evidence of humans communicating with many other animals including wolves, foxes, crows and whales. Our new understanding of animals allows connections that bring a restorative balance to the human psyche. I’ve long been drawn to myths that explore relationships between humans and animals. In these tales people communicate with animals, accept guidance and even designate them as gods. Mythology and scientific research both state that clear communication exists between animals and humans and also between animals of the same and different species.
My paintings on interspecies communication comprise my own personal contemporary myths. Viewers enter a world where diverse creatures are connected. The oldest art in the world contains animal figures. Cave paintings in Spain and France, Native American pictographs and Egyptian hieroglyphics depict animals as part of everyday life and as sacred symbols. Myths and legends inspired by animals became part of a spiritual framework. They helped our ancestors grapple with those eternal questions that have relevance today “Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?”
Ann Morris
I have called many places home over my lifetime. They all have their particular charms and stories. Home can mean safety and security or it can harbor ghosts and cobwebby corners. My Childhood Memory Map reflects that. When I was 17, I set out to create my own home spaces. Motherhood Memory Map evokes the basement apartment in a beach community where I lived with my young children for a time. Here and Now is where I hang my hat today – a home that is definitely a sanctuary, a safe haven and a comfort zone.
Susan J Murphy
My work has always been so diverse that I had no recognizable style, but recently I started my first series, Saugerties My Home Town. I take a photo of a special place in Saugerties, have it printed small, and glue it to a piece of drawing paper or a canvas, then I paint around it with acrylics, extending the lines and color fields to abstraction. The effect, to me, is to render the photograph a kind of gem in an abstract setting. So far I have completed 8 of these, and sold 2.
Eileen Power
There is magic in manifesting ideas.
I love the process of making art – of turning something upside down and inside out – of trying variations on the same theme. I enjoy exploring the many possibilities of an image or technique. There isn’t a raw material I would turn away. I particularly like upcycling objects others might discard into art.
I am drawn to color, but I also appreciate the absence of color.
A good line is very seductive.
I try to maintain a “what would happen if…” frame of mind. My goal is to remain open to as many possibilities and mediums as possible, to “show up” and see what happens.
Ultimately, I’m fascinated by the inexplicable nature of the process of making and responding to art.
Betsey Regan
I bought a 250-year-old barn in Woodstock. At some point it was converted into a home.
When I moved in, I started hearing creaking, doors shutting by themselves, and pictures falling. All these could be part of living in a 250-year-old barn, of course. But then I thought I heard whispering and footsteps. After a while, I wasn’t startled by these noises anymore. I began thinking of all the people who lived in here, and probably died in here.
I began a series of the women and children I pictured as my “ghosts.” I started to love and accept them as part of my home. It was comforting.
Steven Rushefsky
My drawings use pen & ink on paper.
I draw in layers. The first layers are typically in paler colors. As the drawing progresses, selected areas become bolder and some of the underdrawing layers peek through. This is the part of looking at drawings that I love the most – seeing the artist’s hand at work, and being a bit of a detective studying underlayers to determine how the final piece came to be.
Each day, I work to focus on beautiful things. Creating drawings of positive things means a lot to me.
Lisa Samalin
What I’ve come to know as an artist is to paint what I love. It’s been a journey. I have made art from many places within myself at different times. Early on it was often from anger, fear, outrage, despair, and that’s a valid thing to do. And after a lifetime as an artist, I’ve arrived here, where if I don’t love what I am looking at, I have no business painting it. Painting is an act of love now.
This is sacred for me, a kind of altered consciousness in which I bring the very best in me and hope that something conveys. Some of the work is interactive (the installations), always it is about color and light, or the light in darkness, and a kind of layout that feels like a dance. It’s my honor to step into the place I make art from, my honor and my joy.
John Scribner
Anatomical prints, found photos, branches and soil, artificial food, bones, and old toys are some of the provocative objects I reconstitute into art that infuses the familiar with mystery. Collage and assemblage sculpture evoke disjointed narratives that reference History, Science, Literature, and the Arts. Rational bearings are tweaked with humor and critique in work that channel vibrant wells of memory and dreams.
Kurt Steger
My sculptures speak to the relationship between the natural world and human nature. They are constructed with traditional materials (wood, concrete, steel), and I often use impermanent elements in my process (ice, fire, erosion) that allude to the passage of time. The stain left by the fugitive materials is a reminder of the devastating imprint that humans have imposed on the environment. I was trained as a carpenter and woodworker, and value the beauty of fine craftsmanship and design. Working by hand, I combine knowledge and intuition, bridging the gap between mind and heart. Beyond the physicality of the objects that I create, there are the invisible agents that speak to the soul, and my work addresses our need to reestablish this primal connection with nature.
David Tumblety
I hope people who view my art will discover something in it they can call their own.
Joanne Pagano Weber
I am a narrative artist in many visual media, as well as writing. A significant part of my practice is representational painting; broadly, of the ‘theatre of life”, and in, at times, specifically psychological themes. In this category, I envision the realm of “Home” as a space of the mind more than a depiction of a place. The narrative action and the composed elements of a painting bring forth a heightened, dreamlike sense of reality.
My works shown were painted at different times and with somewhat different concerns, but all focused on the subconscious, invisible story within the concrete.
Anna West
I’ve lived on both coasts and in between, and I travel a lot. But I’m closest to home when I know not only what I’m going to paint but also how, and I don’t know that until I’m actually painting and repainting. Then, suddenly, it’s over. Time to start looking again.
Lynn Woods
I’m interested in light and its translation into color, space as defined by a series of intersecting planes and shapes, and the frame of the rectangle as the determining factor in the composition. My goal is to distill my subject to its essence, removing extraneous details and revealing the geometry of the composition. I seek to make representational paintings with an underlying abstract logic. It’s a constant struggle, usually involving many adjustments, but also a process of discovering. And nothing is more pleasurable than mixing colors.
Gallery Hours
• During opening receptions 4-7pm
Regular Gallery Hours
Thursday 12-5
Friday-Saturday 12-6
Sunday 12-5
& Showing by Appointments
Closed Holidays
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