Adrian Meraz Artist Statement- The sculptures individually & collectively form a game, a language structure, with open fields, stops & stalls; a means to explore difference, systems of organization & sculpture as images. I think of each work as a community, a space between motion & paralysis; an aggregate with the potential for transformation. The irregularities within repetition, the phantoms of organization, the interference/ distortion of color & titles are navigational devices.

Artist Bio - Adrian Meraz holds an MFA from Yale School of Art & BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. He has been in solo and group shows in New York and elsewhere. Awards include the California Community FOundation Grant and the Saul &Sally Fifer Berenstein/Friends of Joe Mugnaini Award. Meraz lives & works in Saugerties, NY.

Becca Van K Artist Statement- My artistic spirit is committed to tenderness, reverence, generosity, and humor. My practice focuses on, but is not exclusive to, the techniques of needlepoint, latch hook rug making, and macramé, which are still largely overlooked in the fine art world. Few combine the set of techniques I use, and they are a map of my self-taught and mother-taught experiences. I take pride in the time-consuming nature of this work, and aim to create pieces that subvert conventional ideas about the function of handcrafts. I feel spiritual satisfaction in the act of repetitive handcraft as an act of meditation and creativity. My work draws from the natural world, 80s/90s aesthetics, house/techno music, and comforting objects. My ethos is highly sensory, and listening exclusively to house and techno mixes when working puts me in a repetitious, meditative rhythm through which I transcribe my sensorial experiences of touch, sound, and sight. I exhibit my work in various forms, with a passion for immersive tactile installations of my soft sculpture, furniture, and wall works. Prior to COVID-19, these installations were touchable. I am adapting to new methods of connection with my viewers through “work from home” remote soft sculpture workshops with my community members, though I am still struggling to figure out ways to maintain my ethos when my viewers can’t physically engage with my work.

Artist Bio- Becca Van K (b. 1991, Chicago, IL) is a mixed media fiber artist based in Catskill, ​ NY. She translates her deepest passions - the natural world, 80s/90s graphics and nostalgia, house and techno music, and comforting objects - into vibrant colors & pattern combinations with various handcraft and fiber art methods. Her work has been most recently exhibited at HiLo (Catskill, NY), Sou’wester Lodge (Seaview, WA), Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA), and Hastings College (Hastings, NE). She is a recent recipient of the 2020 NYFA Keep NYS Creating Grant and will be in artist residency at Yellowstone National Park in the Fall. Torn between city nightlife and the woods of the Catskill Mountains, she’d only leave New York if there were techno clubs in the desert. The happiness of her viewers is at the center of her practice.

Brent Owens Artist Statement- The specific type of woodworking that I engage in is a way for me to approach contemporary topics and points of interest in a visual “dialect” that serves multiple purposes. On the one hand, the dialect harks back to the culture of my youth: rural, small town North and South Carolina, the Bible Belt, Mountain Dew, the shadow of Appalachia. On the other hand, the dialect allows me to tap into two disparate strands of Americana - a sense of workmanship communicated by the craft element of the wood-working, and a thirst for novelty that is addressed in the choice of subject matter and the paint and material applications that seemingly run counter to the spirit of the time honored carving techniques employed. Through this way of working, and through the combination of time honored craft and novel, even garish, subject matter and material application, a sense of humor and pathos emerge and coalesce into a grotesquerie that varies in degree from one work to another. This grotesquerie harks back to another great influence from my formative years: Southern Gothic literature, and specifically the work of Flannery O’ Connor. In the tradition of the Southern Gothic, the work seeks in part to highlight or examine social ills, particularly the perverse relationship that we as a culture have with the natural world.

Artist Bio- Brent Owens was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1980 and received ​ a BFA with an emphasis in Sculpture from Winthrop University in 2003. He currently lives and works in New York City. In his formative years in Western North Carolina and South Carolina, Appalachian folk-craft, a Southern Baptist upbringing, and Southern Gothic Literature imparted indelible influences on his work and life. He has shown extensively in exhibitions throughout New York, and in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Venice, Italy. He is the recipient of the 2021 National Academy Affiliated American Academy in Rome Fellowship.

Chris Victor Artist Statement- Chris Victor’s work explores an impulsive spirit of making. He uses a ​ wide range of commonly available stuff, including recyclables and other found material. His abstract sculptures and installations show an omnivorous appetite for improvising making processes. These often transform the previously recognizable materials into new meanings and impacts on the viewer.

His work searches for these new, personal ways of making to simultaneously communicate both the meandering, improvised journey, as well as the arrival at something greater than the sum of its parts.

Artist Bio- Chris received his BFA from Tyler School of Art. His work has been shown at ​ numerous venues including The Samuel Dorsky Museum, The Grand Rapids Public Museum, and the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie. Chris has been a resident at the Wassaic Project artist residency, and was awarded a NYFA Fellowship in Sculpture in 2014.

Christina Tenaglia Artist Statement- At a time when information is fast, easy and overwhelmingly ever present - yet substantially insufficient - these works deliberately communicate less. I am thinking about how we receive and process information from our everyday surroundings and situations. This installation is a hybrid, simultaneously suggesting object, person and structure, meant to baffle or confound, coaxing a longer look, a slowing down, where less information can be better seen, observed, experienced and considered. The objects both present themselves plainly and obfuscate their function or purpose. It is a pairing down, not into a headline or minimalistic object, but into a detail, an unnamable, or a peculiarity.

Artist Bio- Christina Tenaglia holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. She has been the recipient of a NJ State Arts Council Fellowship Award for Sculpture, and has received fellowships for residencies at MacDowell, I-Park, and Catwalk. She was awarded the W.K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts in 2011, and was a recipient of a purchase award grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition in 2018. She has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York and elsewhere. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Vassar College, living and working in Saugerties, NY.

Claire Sherwood Artist Statement- My recent work explores the space that exists between the physically visible and the unseen. From the smallest earthly particles to the stars, galaxies, and ​ the largest structures of all, we often don’t contemplate the things we can not discern visually. Much of my work documents the empty space that surrounds us, searching for meaning in the void, and validation in all that makes up ‘nothing’.

Inspired by the 1907 Duncan MacDougall study in which he hypothesized that souls ​ have physical weight, I often create intimate clay or paper mache’ forms using the negative spaces around my body as templates; the space within my cupped hands, the ​ area under my neck at a heightened twist, the negative between my arms bent uncomfortably. I’ve become more interested in examining the space my body frames, rather than the physical world itself.

Analyzing ‘nothing’ has a funny way of validating my existence as a middle aged woman and mother. Throughout the long, cold spring and into the hot summer months, time, ​ this year has stood still. The quareetien has kept me at home struggling to teach art online while helping my own children navigate their schooling and emotions about the virus, social isolation, political unrest and their future.

As the world spun into chaos I grappled with anxiety, fear and anger as to where we are headed as a human race. It was difficult to concentrate, my creative energy and time disrupted and the validity of creating at all, questioned. I found solace in reading about scientists who found significance in abstract places. David Starr Jordan and William ​ ​ Hennig, in particular, led me to places that were both theoretically and conceptually ​ ​ relevant to our Country’s current social-political state of affairs. The work presented at Collar Works was created in response to their studies and the dangers of classification in general.

Artist Bio- Claire is an Independent artist, photographer and blog writing mother of two. ​ She is based in upstate, NY where she works out of her home studio creating sculptures, installations, mixed-media drawings and experimental (at least to her) photography and video work.

Claudia Tienan Bio Claudia Tienan is a Bluegrass musician, visual artist, obsessive collector of all things imaginable, news addict, and expert on current affairs. Her works play upon and confess a deep need for connection with the world and understanding of those around her.

Matt Crane Artist Statement- My constructs are simultaneously familiar yet unique and point to the liminal space of the in between and of transformation. They live somewhere within the familiar and the unknown. This idea mirrors the human condition and how many of us make our way in the world, sometimes fitting in while at other times standing out.

Artist Bio- Matt Crane graduated Kansas City Art Institute in 1995 from the Sculpture Department. After moving to Brooklyn, New York, he initiated a design / build metal arts fabrication facility, silvercrane llc. (c. 1998). His long list of clients include Robert Gober, Erin Shirreff, Ivan Navarro, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. The cross-disciplinary artist and fabricator simultaneously began a long term relationship with Kohler Company in Kohler, WI, creating and managing the Kohler Company Collection of Art which lasted until 2010 when Crane returned to Academia to earn his Masters from the University at Albany Department of Art and Art History. He now has a home and studio in Columbia County, NY where he makes sculpture and drawings and facilitates projects for area artists and previous clients. A proficient, fabricator and foundryman Crane has worked with various materials and scales to achieve his goals as an artist. Having worked with, and attended several artist residencies and symposia, Crane most recently was awarded the 2019 Summer Visiting Artist in Residence at Sloss Furnaces, a National Historic Landmark in Birmingham, Alabama. Capitalizing on this opportunity several thousand pounds of iron were cast for his solo exhibition at the Historic Power House at Sloss Furnaces and a second exhibition at Yellow Round in Hudson, New York. Currently teaching a sculpture based welding and fabrication class at the University at Albany, Crane continues to pursue opportunities both nationally and internationally.

Dan Devine Artist Bio- Dan Devine’s sculptures, installations and photographs explore the relationship between interior and exterior spaces. His current work is preoccupied with questions concerning space reversal as a means to explore our relationship to technology and nature. A former professional motorcycle racer, Devine brings creative tinkering and conceptual rigor to his work while redefining the spectator’s relationship to internal volumes. Notable projects include his Inside Out Car pieces and concrete ​ ​ castings of the space between crashed vehicles after impact. Dan Devine is Chair of the Sculpture Department at Hofstra University where he also the Director of the Rosenberg Gallery. For over four decades, his work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums and has been reviewed in major publications. Recent exhibitions include: Inside Out Nascar at Icehouse Project Space September 8, 2018 and Dan Devine - ​ ​ Impact at Thompson Giroux Gallery, Spring 2019. ​

Artist Statement-

Diana Bursztyn Artist Bio/Statement- My studio practice encompasses sculpture, ceramics, mixed media, works on paper and artist's books. I have shown extensively in museums and galleries, in the US as well as abroad, most recently at Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, Katerskill Gallery, Labspace, Samuel Dorsky Museum, and numerous others. Also, I have been awarded public art commissions, by NYC MTA's Arts & Design Program, NYC Percent for the Arts Program and the Public Art Fund among others.

Originally from Argentina, I have been living in the USA since the 70's, currently I reside in Catskill,where I co-own with my wife Julie Chase the Open Studio - www.openstudiocatskill www.dinabursztyn.com

Julie Chase Artist Statement/Bio- I work in a variety of media, including assemblage, collage, ​ doll-making, embroidery and painting. I am always searching for a song of sorts, a way of taking found elements, that largely go unnoticed in our daily lives and arranging them into a whole/piece that has visual rhythm and balance or curious relations among them that in turn reveal something new or before hidden/unseen. I have been participating in and curating shows in the Hudson Valley for the last 20 years.

I was born in Alabama in 1966, attended Auburn University and City College in NYC. Currently I live and work in Catskill, New York. I co-own, with my wife Dina, the storefront gallery Open Studio, on Main Street in the village of Catskill.

Elisa Soliven Artist Statement- My sculptures serve as a recorded inquiry in capturing the talismanic ​ essence of the human figure and more abstract connotations of love, loss, and being a person. Working with clay simultaneously retains an immediacy with which conveys the hands-on working process, captures a sense of wonder in the ordinary and ultimately, preserves a frozen, reimagined history. Transfiguring these quotidian monuments through archaeological accumulation of modeled layers of clay, and embedded ceramic, and found materials, the familiar becomes a vessel for personal mythologies, social commentaries, and universal truths.

My latest series are figurative that also suggest geological formations. Each contains particular idiosyncrasies that individuate from the mass while still embodying a group togetherness. I started including gray because of its neutrality. Through formal transformations,I then move into material and formal creation. This body of work is painted in various shades of blues, earth tones, and grays, with the mosaic like modules bringing vibrant color to the sculpture. I am also using aluminum leaf as a unifying surface and texture. Aluminum is reflective, yet it allows for the glazed ceramic underneath to peer through. I start by deciding on specific dimensions for a grouping of sculptures and then from there I work within those parameters.

Currently my works are flat, square, and planar even though they are both rough and smooth texture. I add irregular pieces of fired clay that I then build the piece around and meld into new multifarious structures. This almost archaeological method often determines the shape because I am working with unique pieces that have their own distinct forms. I try to unify them together into a whole, using the grid, transforming them into a singular, unified yet irregular body that conjures both man-made and geologic formations.

Artist Bio- Elisa Soliven, born in New York City, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received an M.F.A. from Hunter College in 2011 and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College. Her work has been reviewed by Art Critical, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times. She has shown at Nudashank, Baltimore, MD; Sardine, Brooklyn, NY; Present Company, Brooklyn, NY; Deanna Evans Projects, Brooklyn, NY; LABspace, Hillsdale, NY; The Reinstitute, Millerton, NY; Arts & Leisure, NYC; Crush Curatorial, NYC; and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL among others. She has had solo exhibitions at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY; Sunday Takeout, Brooklyn, NY; and Essex Flowers, NYC. She is also a co-founder the Bushwick based artist collective, Underdonk.

Eleanor White Artist Statement- I’m usually thinking about metamorphosis and life’s circular pattern in my art. The materials I use to make the stuff varies but the outcome has the same references for me. My long view of nature’s cycles is gathering dandelion fluff every year in Springtime since 2002 to the present, as seen in the piece “Spring Again”. The fluffy seeds that are despised by most give me motivation to work and harvest them so I can add the fresh material to my spiral sculpture. This weird little ritual is something I look forward to every year even though it’s extremely labor intensive. It’s beyond tedious but meditative to gather the fluff, put it in hundreds and hundreds of tiny bags and pin the bags into bunches.

The piece “Only the Shell” makes reference to renewal and at the same time what’s left behind. This piece is constructed of eggshells joined together in a shelf form like a mushroom or organic growth. I’ve been collecting eggshells for years and I use them whole and also ground into a kind of paint. Calcium fascinates me as it’s the beginning and what’s left over as bones, the basic building block of all of us.

Artist Bio- ​Eleanor White is based in Beacon, NY. She received her M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, MD on a full scholarship from the Jacob K. Javits Foundation. She earned her BFA. from Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond VA. She has participated in a number of residencies including the Bemis Center in Omaha Nebraska and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Sweet Briar Virginia. Her work has been included in exhibitions such as: Another World, charity postcard sale, Frieze London; Cross-Pollination, Boscobel; Tick Tock, Time in Contemporary Art, Lehman College; Case Studies, Gallery Aferro; Intent and Purpose, Kenise Barnes Fine Arts; Materiality, Westchester Community College; Kerosene Garden, Able Fine Arts; Art Miami Art Fair;. Her work is included in The Montefiore Fine Art Program, The Deutsche Bank Art Collection and many private collections.

Guy Walker

Bio 2019 Underdonk Gallery: Brooklyn, NY Fur Cup ​ Safe Gallery: Brooklyn, NY Family Show ​ ​ 2018 The Reinstitute: Millerton, NY Tickle The Atman ​ 2017 Safe Gallery Brooklyn, NY Daniel Herr and Guy Walker ​ 2016 111 Front Street Gallery: Forth Estate Editions Review ​ ​ ​ 2015 Halsey McKay Gallery: East Hampton, NY Make/Shift ​ 2014 Kathleen Cullen Gallery: NY NY Desperately Seeking Susan ​ 2013 Anabel curated by Louise Sheldon Daily Review ​ as Perry Films Artistic Director: Robbie Robertson: Native American Musical, PBS Imagining America, VH1 And You Don't Stop (30 Years Of ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Hip-Hop with Bill Adler), VH1 The Drug Years ​

Articles on Guy Walker include Ken Johnson: The New York Times, Martha Schwendener: Art Forum, Bomb, Art In America

Henry Kilmowicz Artist Statement- Cardboard is simple and straightforward. It is also a severely limited material. It has an ever-present cultural bias related to its past uses as a container or its present use as waste. I love it when the material transcends its cultural confines. If I can make something beautiful from cardboard, I have then said that anything can be made valuable, fruitful, or hopeful. I see this work as very positive because of the lengths that have been traveled by the material from trash to beauty. It is a statement about the possible—that all things can be redeemed, often for more than what was deposited. Creativity can be that redeemer.

Artist Bio- I was born Milwaukee WI in 1962. I received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in 1984. I attended Skowhegan School of Art in 1984. I received a MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1990. I am the director of The Re Institute, an alternative gallery located in my studio since 2010.

Hui Lee Statement

Hui Lee is an artist working in textiles and sculpture who investigates the invisible dimensions of self-preservation and the particular relationship between one’s private and public participation. While considering the built environment to intimate psychological spaces, she focuses on conditions of domesticity where the home functions as the demarcated space between one’s interior and exterior self. She uses familiar items that structure daily existence and examines how these objects retain the stain of intra- and interpersonal connections. As private cogitation is continuously shaped by social and cultural assumption,. Lee aims to provide moments of reflexive consideration through her work as a point of examining one’s own behavior with tact, empathy, and delicacy.

Bio

Hui Lee (b. 1992) earned her BA from Bard College in 2020. She was awarded the Stanley Landsman Scholarship, the Elizabeth Murray and Sol Lewitt Studio Arts Award, and the Ellen Battell Stoekel Fellowship to attend the Yale School of Art. She currently lives and works in Catskill, NY.

Jennifer Johnson Artist Statement- Clay engages the physical, the day to day, and an emotionality of remembrance of where we come from. As I reflect on “pause,” “sheltering in place,” “quarantine,” and “physical distancing”, these pieces help me consider what is important. Through clay, I create a bridge between raw material, myself, the world and new possibilities.

Touch Me (Gently), speaks to this time and asks how we can more lovingly come together and ​ co-exist. Each pinch pot exists individually as well as within the collective. The pieces relate to each other forming subgroups, reacting and engaging. They are arranged to encourage multiple interpretations and engagement.

Bio- Jennifer Johnson is an artist and creative arts therapist who lives and works in Hillsdale and New York City. Jennifer’s current art practice includes work with clay as well as drawing on paper. Jennifer is inspired by nature and visionary artists such as Anna Zemankova and Sonia Delaunay. Her clay work has been included in group exhibitions at LABspace in Great Barrington and Hillsdale; The Pittsfield Museum; Verdigris Tea House, Hudson; and 180 The Store, New York City. Other experience includes work at The Willem de Kooning Office and as founder and coordinator of The Creative Arts Therapy Program at Hudson Guild, in New York City. Her practice is grounded in art history, community building and engagement

George Spencer Art Statement- I never know what will come next or where it will come from. The connection between beginning and end is a mystery in terms of where I start, where I go and how I get there. My muse is a big cauldron in my head into which sensations have been pouring since birth. Sometimes it simmers, sometimes it boils, sometimes it freezes over. I can’t control the temperature or what comes to the surface. I don’t recognize hierarchies of materials, of work processes, of subject matter, of color or compositional traditions, or of workmanship and finish. For me art should not be ​ structured. It should not be a place where the eye finds repose. It must be rough edged ​ with mistakes, excess, the unexpected, the unpremeditated. It must try to find innocence. This is what makes the art of children the truest expression in the world.

Bio- I studied anatomy, painting and sculpture evenings at the Art Students League and the New York Academy during the 1970’s. However I devoted most of my non-day job time to writing poetry and fiction. My most recent book of poetry, Unpious Pilgrim, was ​ ​ published by Fly By Night Press and is available through Amazon. I continue to be published in magazines and anthologies.

In addition I produced and directed documentaries that regularly aired on TimeWarner’s Manhattan Neighborhood Network and were screened at Millennium Film Workshop, Filmmaker Co-op, Gathering of the Tribes, Brecht Forum and various other progressive venues in New York City. When living in Ecuador I started the first poetry Slam and showed my paintings and collages at Café Libro Gallery in Quito. Now I spend most of my time in the visual arts.

I recently had a solo show at Joyce Goldstein Gallery in Chatham. Additionally, I was in group shows at the Hyde Collection in Glenn Falls, Thompson Giroux Gallery in Chatham, at the Greene County Council of the Arts in Catskill and at Lab Space in Hillsdale.

I also do radio and cable interviews with artists and other creative people. Last year I curated an eight hour reading/musical event dedicated to James Joyce's Ulysses on WGXC. Currently I am co-curating a virtual Protest Art Show. Last year the Protest Art Show was at TSL in Hudson.

Joan Grubin ​ Artist Statement

Joan Grubin is a visual artist based in New York City and the upstate Hudson River Valley. Her dimensional work in paper is characterized by formal rigor upended by a sense of whimsy and is rooted in process, play, and the qualities intrinsic to paper. She makes objects and installations engaging an interaction between the physicality of paper and pigment, and the visible but immaterial ingredients of reflected color and cast shadows. Pleasure and color are central to her work, which straddles the line between playful humor and spare form.

Bio

Joan Grubin has shown her objects and installations in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally in galleries, universities, non-profit spaces and museums, including the New York Public Library, the Parrish Art Museum, the Weatherspoon Museum, the University of Maine, the Kentler International Drawing Space, and the Atelier Alé in Sao Paolo, Brazil. She was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2008, and has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Kara Smith Artist Statement Packed with energy, rocks are powerful extensions of our geological foundation providing hints of Earth’s physical past. Almost like a secret language, they store clues to past lives and cultural history. Calming and grounding, they remind us of the cycles of nature and the passage of time. By accentuating the natural surface markings and eroded areas with 22 karat gold leaf, I capture the innate wisdom and beauty of the rock. Both pieces in this exhibit were created with stones found within Troy along the Hudson and reference the industrial history of the area.

Artist Bio Kara Smith is a Hudson Valley NY-based artist and art educator. She received a MA in Art Education from Brooklyn College, and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. She has been awarded residencies at MASS MoCA, The Vermont Studio Center, Brooklyn Art Space, and Drop, Forge and Tool, and has exhibited regularly throughout the Northeast. In 2019, she had her first NYC solo exhibition at ChaShaMa and created her first site-specific permanent installation at TurnPark Art Space in West Stockbridge, MA. That same year, she was the recipient of The Martha Boschen Porter Award, a Fund of Berkshire Taconic ​ Community Foundation to support a forthcoming (2020) solo exhibit at Avalanche Art Space in ​ Great Barrington, MA. Smith is currently a Teaching Artist and Program Coordinator at Community Access to the Arts (CATA), an arts organization in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts that provides visual and performing arts workshops to individuals with disabilities.

Karlos Carcamo Artist Statement My work plays on themes that incorporate high and low cultural references that reflect my interest in Modernism, Art History, and Urban Culture. I’m interested in how the constructed nature found in urban culture can be used as a conceptual method to explore formal issues related to contemporary art while also commenting on various aspects of our everyday life.

My crate painting exists as both a hybrid of painting and sculpture and minimalist abstraction. Incorporating the use of the milk crate to store paintings, the piece directly alludes to DJ culture and their use of the milk crate to store vinyl records. It plays on the notion of “digging in the crates” which is the “act of seeking out records to sample or production.” Sampling being the equivalent of appropriation within the art context but in this case what I am sampling is a stylist type of abstract painting being a monochrome.

My sneaker piece “Untitled (PUMA) 2013” is a hanging sculptural piece that consists of two sneakers hanging from a wire in which the soles of the sneakers have been mirrored similar to a disco ball. The work is a homage to the commons practice of tossing a pair of shoes with the laces tied together onto raised wires such as telephone wires and power lines, often seen in many urban cities. The soles being mirrored and its connection to a disco ball is a metaphor to the idea of staying out all night or partying all night which is in many aspects a fleeting moment. It also is a symbolic object, two sneakers hanging from wire, which in urban folklore has many associations from marking a drug spot to marking a gang turf and so forth. My interest is on the idea of “marking” and its reflection as a sculptural object in a specific space, time and place.

Artist Bio Karlos Cárcamo has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Hunter College, both in New York. He has exhibited extensively including at the Brooklyn Museum; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; MoMA PS1 and Queens Museum of Contemporary Art, both Queens, NY; El Museo del Barrio, Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, and Artists Space, all NY; Jersey City Museum and Aljira Center of Contemporary Art, both NJ; and Museo de Arte de El Salvador. His work is in private and public art collections including; The Mario Cader-Frech Collection, El Museo del Barrio, Deutsche Bank Art foundation, Red Bull Corporate Art Collection and the Permanent Collection at the Raina Sophia in Madrid, Spain. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, and the Village Voice, among other ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ publications.

Katharine Umsted Bio: Born in Newport, RI, Katharine Umsted grew up in small towns in South Carolina and Illinois. After graduating from the College of Charleston she moved to New York for an MFA at the School of Visual Arts. Identifying as a sculptor, Ms Umsted makes work which reflects her personal response to her world experience. This has included helmets, breast plates, shields and chain mail dresses. Most recently her preoccupation has been taking form in life boats. Umsted also makes paintings and small books with time and landscape as a subject. She has shown widely. Recent solo shows include her landscape drawings at Gallery Tanja Grunert in Chelsea and large collages at the Art Kiosk in Redwood City, CA. She lives and works in New York City and Hudson, NY.

Statement: These little pink Lifeboats are part of an ongoing series inspired by the hopes, dreams and will to live evidenced by refugees across the world. They represent the fantasy of an idealized future and the delusion uncovered by reality. It can also be said that they mirror the philosophy and current reality of the United States.

Formally, they are inspired by Richard Serra, John Chamberlain and Ursula Von Rydingsvard. The boat forms can be stoic and monumental or, fluid and sculptural. But, rather than metal and wood, these are made with plaster bandages, painted pink and coated in cloudlike glitter.

Each of the Lifeboats is subtitled a girl’s name with it’s translation. In parentheses is the country of origin.

Paula Lalala Bio Paula Lalala is an interdisciplinary artist. The scale of her work traverses a broad territory, ranging from the extremely intimate through fairly epic. Since 1983 her artwork has been presented throughout much of the US and internationally including Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Venues have included abandoned lots and buildings, refrigerators, offices, other people’s performances, a rooming house, houses, her home (which has been opened to the public on numerous occasions), art fairs, universities, hospitals, offices, galleries, museums, and public spaces.

Born in 1966, Paula grew up in Texas as a devout Christian Fundamentalist. Throughout childhood and adolescence she experienced numerous traumatic events while living a seemingly safe and stable suburban, middle-class American lifestyle. She survived life on the streets as a teenage runaway. Paula discovered art when she was seventeen years old and has been working passionately ever since. She has a sweetheart and is a grandmother.

Probing the spiritual, social, and psychological realms, her artwork takes many forms. She has a project based practice which includes traditional studio work as well as collaborations including up to 40 others (thus far). Besides paintings, sculptures, photographs, interactive performances, and installations, some of the additional projects initiated by Paula include:

● The Paula Lalala MVSEVM, an ongoing long term large scale autobiographical artwork, visited by thousands, and open to the public since 2000. ● The Women Artist Team, TWAT, is a group of 40 women who have worked collaboratively to create multiple iterations of a monochromatic bedroom installation. ● The Autodidact Institute, an organization which facilitates Awards, Certificates, Ceremonies and Outreach pertaining to self-directed learning. ● The Landscape Preservation Society, whose primary goal is raising funds to protect open spaces through the sale of nature based artworks.

Goals and aspirations to live by - generative over exploitative, kind instead of cruel, augment rather than diminish, encourage over belittle, humane not inhumane.

Statement Currently I’m liking to think about art as energetic actions. I also enjoy art as physical material objects.

Other Areas Of Interest:

Lived Experience The Ineffable Embodiment Transformation Emotions The Search For Meaning In Life Psychology Interconnectedness Decay Fragmentation and Integration Play The Imagination Realms of Existence

Seth Koen Artist Statement- What can a line do? ​ In my work I am engaged in the endeavor of drawing, using line and mass in space and on paper to investigate how we see and experience the world. I am seeking to activate the room with an object the way one might with a line on paper. I am drawn to the perceptual flip that can happen, where the flat becomes dimensional, when front becomes back- the liminal space where two dimensions become three and three become two.

My interest lies in the making, but not in doing it the right way. I love the materials I use, but they are a means to an end and not the meaning of the work. I am working to embody my questions and curiosities with a slow improvisation, each move a reaction to the last.

Artist Bio- Seth Koen is originally from Maine. After receiving a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, Koen went on to earn his MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA. After graduate school, Koen worked as the studio assistant to sculptor Ron Nagle for 12 years. He has shown widely, including shows in the San Francisco Bay area at Gregory Lind Gallery, C2C Project Space (in collaboration with Gary Peterson), Rena Bransten Gallery, the Richmond Art Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Adobe Books, the LAB, the Thomas Welton Stanford Gallery and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. In addition, Koen has shown in New York with Jeff Bailey Gallery, Foley Gallery and LABspace; GrizzlyGrizzly, Philadelphia; the Brewery Project, Los Angeles; Chela, Baltimore; Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque; and Galerie Hafemann, Wiesbaden, Germany. Koen has been the recipient of the Trefethen, Cadogan and Kala Art Institute Fellowships, and the Jay Defeo Prize. He was recently included in the 2018 CMCA Biennial at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine. After many years in Sacramento and Oakland, Koen and his family have settled in Easthampton, MA, where he maintains his studio and works in the Art Department at Amherst College.

Ruby Palmer Artist Bio -Ruby Palmer was born in Boston, Mass. and grew up in rural Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. She and her husband and twin girls have lived in Rhinecliff, NY since 2010.

Trained as an abstract painter at Hampshire College (1988-92) she started experimenting with sculpture and installation at the School of Visual Arts in NYC (MFA 1998-2000) as a way to work larger and directly with the architecture of the room. In 1999 she was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors. Her work includes drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and wood constructions which are a medley of all her interests. In March 2020, several of her large constructions were included in a group exhibition, “Cut and Color”, at the Albany International Airport. Ruby recently had a two person show at the Foundation Gallery at Columbia Greene Community College in Hudson (2019), and a solo show with Jeff Bailey Gallery in Hudson, NY (2018). She has exhibited work at the Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, NY, Morgan Lehman Gallery in NY, Page Bond Gallery in Richmond VA, Geoffrey Young Gallery in MA, Instar Lodge in Germantown NY, LABspace in Hillsdale NY, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn.

In 2016, Ruby started ARTalks, an artist lecture series held at the Morton Memorial Library in Rhinecliff, NY which features two Hudson Valley artists presenting their work.

Artist Statement- The constructions are made of cut and painted wood adhered onto shaped supports, and are free form and improvisational in nature, encouraging a meandering visual journey. The first pieces in this body of work, which began back in 2001-2, were considered models for large platforms that would be built above the actual floor. I hung these pieces on the wall to make room on my studio table, and realized their relationship to painting. I liked the gesture of putting the floor on the wall, reversing logic. A playful, whimsical dialogue with formal issues in painting has emerged, as well as a layered, organic, compressed architectural space.

I'm interested in the constructions being both objects, like sculpture, and images, like paintings, at once. The Cubist’s assemblages and collages, as well as crafts like quilt making, inlay, and mosaic tile patterns have been influential. The bird’s eye view of a landscape is always intriguing and also inspiring. However, the logic underlying my work goes on its own journey, and hopefully takes a viewer to a more personal place.

I may start with a color or structural relationship, but the making takes over as soon as I begin laying down areas of pattern or non-pattern. Living in the Hudson Valley in upstate NY for the past 9 years has influenced my forms and ideas as I spend more time in or looking at the woods and more time thinking about the contrast between forms found in nature and those that are man-made. My background is in abstract painting and installation, and I've found the term "building paintings" to be an apt description of what I do.

Stuart Farmery Statement What stacks up? What makes sense? How do we elevate ourselves in these difficult times and social unrest. How do we hold true against a myriad of lies and belittlement. We rise up. Maintain our inner core of hope and enlightenment. Fight back with colour and diversity. Beacons of hope. Altars of love and vibrancy. Ostracized is a collaborative work with fabric artist Robin McKay. Bio British / American born 1953 Lives and works in Ghent NY SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2019 ‘Benchmark’, Rosenberg Gallery, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 2018 ‘Bearing Up’, Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Chatham, NY 2016-2017 Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Woodstock, NY 2015 Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Chatham, NY 1996-8 SoHo Medical Center, NY, NY 1996 Tabak Real Estate, NY, NY GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 SpaceLAB, Collar Works, Troy NY 2020 20/20 Vision, Holland Tunnel Art, Newburgh NY 2019 Drawn Down, Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Chatham NY 2019 Wilderstein 5th Outdoor Sculpture Biennial, Rhinebeck NY 2019 ‘ISDAY Saugerties’ Cross Contemporary Gallery, Saugerties NY 2019 Art 4 Food, Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Chatham NY 2018 BIG Holiday Show, LabSpace, Hillsdale NY 2018 Hawthorne Gallery, Woodstock NY 2018 ‘ISDAY Saugerties’ Cross Contemporary Gallery, Saugerties NY 2017 ‘Sculpture Now’ The Mount, Lenox MA 2017 ‘Rainbows Gravity – before the dark days’ D Day Studio, Woodstock NY 2017 ‘Piles, Stacks, Lumps & Mounds’ Canal Street Market – Sight Unseen NY Design Week 2017 ‘Taconic North’ – small works show, Labspace, Hillsdale NY 2017 ‘Members Show’ Spencertown Academy, Spencertown NY 2017 ‘Saugerties Sculpture’ Cross Contemporary Art, Saugerties, NY, 12477 2016 Woodstock Byrdecliffe Guild Annual Fund Raising Show 2016 Spencertown Academy Annual Juried Show, Spencertown NY 2015 ‘Shifting Ecologies’ Athens Cultural Center, Athens, NY, 12015. Curated by Marianne Van Lent 2015 Nomad Gallery in conjunction with Joyce Goldstein. Dugway Road, Spencertown NY 1998 Juried Competition, Phoenix Gallery, New York City. Curated by Beth Venn 1998 "I Create You Create", Citibank, 108 Hudson St, New York City. Curated by Ethan Cohen 1998 The Parrish Art Museum, The Centennial Open, Southampton, N.Y. Curated by Ronald Pisano, Helen Harrison, Klaus Kertess, Maureen O’Brien and Donna De Salvo 1997 Tribeca Artwalk, FranklinFest, NYC 1996 35th Juried Exhibition, The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY. Curated by Lisa Phillips, Jack Tilton and Penny McCall 1996 Aljira National Juried 2, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ. Curated by Bill Arning, Joseph Szoecs and Gail Stavitsky 1996 ‘Paper Point Blank’ The Work Space, New York City. Curated by Lily Prince. Catalog 1995 Fort Greene Studio Tour, Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, New York 1995 ‘Sculptors Thinking Drawings’ Organization of Independent Artists, The Police Building, New York City. Curated by James Holl. Catalog STUART FARMERY 2 1995 ‘Buoys: Marking The Place’ Art Initiatives, New York City. Curated by Bill Bace. Catalog 1994 24th Juried Show, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA. Curated by Charlotta Kotik 1993 ‘1000 Drawings’ Artists Space, New York City 1993 Outdoor Sculpture ’93, Organization of Independent Artists, Manhattan Psychiatric Center, Wards Island, New York 1993 ‘Of The Environment’ Putnam Arts Council, Mahopec, New York 1993 OIA Salon Show, Organization of Independent Artists, New York City 1981 Great Jones Gallery, New York City 1980 ‘Hair Through the Ages’ Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York City 1979 Christy’s Art Gallery, Brighton, England 1977 ‘Seven Artists’ Brighton University, Brighton, England 1976 ‘Threshold’ East Sussex Art Center, Lewes, England 1974 ‘Selection of London’s BA Shows’ Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, England WORK 1980 -2014 1975-79 1979 Braff, Phyllis, “A Photographic Return To Places and People”, The New York Times, April 5, 1998. Paper Point Blank. Catalog “What’s Up Downtown”, DOWNTOWN EXPRESS, October 24 1995. Maxwell, Georgene, “Rotunda Gallery Tours” Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill News, October 26 1995. Sculptors Thinking Drawings. Catalog Buoys: Marking The Place. Catalog “Art In Review”, Hornor, David, TRIBECA TRIB, February 1995 “Outdoor Sculpture in Review”, Kimmel, Michael, NEW YORK TIMES, August 6, 1993. Organization Of Independent Artists, Cover Photograph, OIA NEWS LETTER, Spring /Summer, 1993. “Meet the Artist”, Taguchi, Gay, TIMES HERALD RECORD, Sullivan County, New York, June 23, 1993. Best In Show, Putnam Arts Council, Mahopac, New York

WORK 1980 -2014 1975-79 1979 Braff, Phyllis, “A Photographic Return To Places and People”, The New York Times, April 5, 1998. Paper Point Blank. Catalog “What’s Up Downtown”, DOWNTOWN EXPRESS, October 24 1995. Maxwell, Georgene, “Rotunda Gallery Tours” Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill News, October 26 1995. Sculptors Thinking Drawings. Catalog Buoys: Marking The Place. Catalog “Art In Review”, Hornor, David, TRIBECA TRIB, February 1995 “Outdoor Sculpture in Review”, Kimmel, Michael, NEW YORK TIMES, August 6, 1993. Organization Of Independent Artists, Cover Photograph, OIA NEWS LETTER, Spring /Summer, 1993. “Meet the Artist”, Taguchi, Gay, TIMES HERALD RECORD, Sullivan County, New York, June 23, 1993. Best In Show, Putnam Arts Council, Mahopac, New York Construction, NY, NY Teaching, Lewes High School, Lewes, England. Teaching, Brighton University, Brighton, England. EDUCATION 1975 Art Teacher’s Training Certificate, Brighton, England 1970-74 BFA – First Class Honors, Central School of Art and Design, London, England 1967-69 Foundation - Croydon College of Art, Croydon, England

Susan Meyer Statement- Experimental communities influence my work; they epitomize our best and worst instincts colliding. Drop City, was an early (1965) commune in Trinidad, Colorado. At the trash yard, Droppers would use axes to cut out car hoods for their geodesic domes. Given a Dymaxion Award by Buckminster Fuller in ’67, Drop City was abandoned by the early ‘70s. My pieces suggest the forms and palettes of Drop City, and of Modernist architecture and design, with elements of discord. Asian scholar’s stones, objects of psychic transport, are also an inspiration.

Bio- Based in Hudson, NY, Susan Meyer has exhibited her work at venues including LabSpace, The Re Institute, The Teaching Gallery at Hudson Valley Community College, University Art Museum at University at Albany, Albany Institute, NYFA Gallery, Markel Fine Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Artspace New Haven, the Islip Art Museum Carriage House, and Plus Gallery in Denver, CO.

Artist residencies include Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Ucross, Sculpture Space, Pilchuck Glass School and PlatteForum.

Meyer received a B.S. in Studio Art from Skidmore College and a M.F.A. from the Boston Museum School and Tufts University. She is an Associate Professor of Art at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

Susan Jennings Bio- Susan Jennings is an artist who works across several media including painting, sculpture, video, sound and music. She has had exhibitions widely nationally and internationally both as an individual artist and with a collaborative multi-media duo called Black Lake which she dedicated herself to from 2009-2019. She is the recipient of many awards including The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and Art Production Fund Fellowship and Residency at the Musée Claude Monet in Giverny, France, a fellowship at the MacDowell Art Colony, and was a studio resident at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts from 2004-2012. Jennings' work is currently on view in "Mother Alter" at Mother Gallery in Beacon, NY and "Ripple Effect" at Artport Kingston in Kingston, NY.. Jennings had solo exhibitions and residencies in the summer of 2019 at The Yellow Round in Claverack, NY and at LABspace in Hillside, NY.

Statement- I make sound sculptures and sound paintings which function both as art and as percussive instruments. I choose the material I work with for their sound-making qualities, employ found objects as another media, like paint or clay, to work, sculpt and shape. Occasionally the works are activated by myself and invited musicians, and it is my intention that during rest periods the viewer experience imagined sounds generated by the artworks.

Susan Still Scott Statement- Sometimes my work is lightweight and hollow. Sometimes it has the density of a ​ bowling ball. I make irregularly shaped painted constructions—a hybrid language of painting and sculpture. Almost any object can be substituted for a panel or stretcher, and therein lies the challenge. The physicality of a particular piece informs how I paint it, and the developing image changes how I see the form. The wall and/or floor act as a pictorial ground and the art-object itself is the figure. The artist and writer, Stephen Maine describes it this way: “Visually and conceptually, the works hinge on the relationship between polychrome canvas exterior and an armature of which the nature (or even the presence) is a mystery.” I relish this dichotomy. I want the viewer to wonder, as in life, “Why is this ​ like this? How did it happen? How should I look at it?”.

Bio- Susan Still Scott lives and works in the northern Taconic mountains in New Lebanon, NY. Originally from Philadelphia, she is a graduate of Tyler School of Art at Temple University, one year of which was in Rome, Italy focusing on Quattrocento and Early Renaissance Art History. She went on to earn an MFA at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Scott’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and across Europe. Recent shows include Equity Gallery in NYC, RE-Institute in Millerton, NY, LabSPACE in Hillsdale, NY, Melanie Carr Gallery in Essex, CT, Kingston Gallery in Boston, MA, John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY. She is the recipient of residency fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony.

Thomas Lail Statement- Thomas Lail’s works examine our persistent strivings and ideological failings in pursuit of a better world. His works reference fragments from images of hippie communes, high modern architecture, protesting crowds, Edenic floral patterns, flags, borders, and cultivated gardens often reproduced or fragmented to degraded obscurity. In suggesting both the fleeting physical presence and philosophical space of such gestures, Lail’s works consider the once-dreamed-future and the tumultuous moments that give rise to such dreams.

Bio- Thomas Lail is a Capital Region native and holds an MFA from the University at Albany, SUNY and a BS in Studio Art from The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY. Since 1993, Lail has taught drawing and painting at Hudson Valley Community College, SUNY where he is Professor of Fine Arts and a recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor's Award. Lail has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally including New York, Cleveland, Houston, and Montreal as well as Slovakia, London, Belgium and Abu Dhabi among others. He performs and records with experimental music duo soundBarn and the multi-member Location Ensemble. Lail ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ publishes poetry and experimental writing through soundBarn Press and has written ​ ​ numerous reviews and essays including two catalogue essays on the work of Robert Longo. Lail lives and works in a bricolage former-tractor barn on what was once Heald Orchards in Kinderhook, NY with artist Tara Fracalossi and their son, Coltrane. ​ ​

Millicent Young Artist Statement- My artistic practice is informed by the principles of Deep Ecology, Ubuntu (the South African ethic of interdependence and humanity), and contemplative practice. Influential contemporary authors include: Marion Woodman and James Hillman (Jungian psychology), Joanna Macy and David Abram (ecophilosophy), Xavier LePichon (geology), Suzi Gablik and Susan Sontag (art criticism). Art forms of strong influence include poetry and literature, dance, writing forms, and prehistoric art. Thus, the foundation of my own art is multidisciplinary. Life experiences necessarily infuse my source as well: cross-cultural experiences and foreign travel; violence and other forms of loss; living deeply within nature; and intimacy with death and dying.

I am drawn to the metaphors that form along the interfaces of nature, culture and spirit: the twining of geological narratives and written narratives; the codes that contain wisdom no longer accessible; the liminal spaces between presence and absence, self and not self; and the interdependence of vulnerability and strength, predator and prey.

In some of my early works (1995-2001), I explored paradigm transformation through specific events of that time: the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the quest to classify rape as a war crime in the aftermath of the Bosnia Hercegovina War and its hideous rape camps; the survivors’ testimonies and the silenced voices of the millions of survivors in our midst; the juxtaposition of the Albanian refugees driven from Kosovo with the loss of migratory bird habitats. Recent and current works consider topics such as species extinction, warfare, and violence through a more abstracted intimate vocabulary alongside works that address personal loss and journeys of grieving.

Artist Bio- Millicent Young attended New York’s Dalton School on scholarship, and went ​ on to Wesleyan University, the University of Virginia (BA), the University of Denver, and James Madison University (MFA). She has lived in the Piedmont region of Virginia, teaching art at the secondary and college levels and working as a landscape designer and gardener. Young currently lives in Kingston, New York, which is experiencing a renewal as artists move in and galleries open. She has a large detached Victorian home with a studio that she is renovating. When we visited, the entire downstairs was filled with her twig and horsehair sculptures.