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.