Cross Contemporary Art

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Brian WOOD

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Brian Wood
Paintings

Opening Reception Friday, August 25th 2017
Cross Contemporary Art
99 Partition St. Saugerties, New York 12477
on view thru September 24th, 2016

GALLERY HOURS: Thurs- Mon 12-5pm
Full color on-line catalogue with essay by Eleanor Heartney 

Brian Wood’s solo exhibition of paintings opens Friday, August 25th with a reception for the artist from 5 – 8 pm at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY.

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The process of consciousness has always been the source of inquiry for Wood’s work. The boundaries and limits of awareness hold a particular fascination for Wood and it seems likely that the obsessions in his work originate in the earliest phase of life before language and before self – the “chora” in Julia Kristeva’s description. At the beginning of life, instinctual drives, locality, suffering and pleasure, aggression, holding, repulsion, devouring and expelling merge in a timeless non-reflective realm.

Wood is very interested in the way images flash into awareness, fluoresce, and die. He makes a distinction between the images of fantasy (wishing, planning, regretting, wanting) and the very different experience of mental images that seem to arrive from outside of the ego and have the intensity of the real – they light up the nervous system and consciousness with an aliveness that approaches hallucination. It is this level of image and its transformations that he’s interested in discovering and experiencing in his painting – that first flash of image that arrives before the inevitable tip toward language, discursive thought, and narrative fantasy. Importantly, he discovers these pre-linguistic images in the direct process of painting – they could not exist in this form outside of painting. Rather than representations or illustrations of already experienced thought, the manipulation of paint reveals the image in its making.

As Eleanor Heartney describes Wood’s paintings: “They balance on the cusp between abstraction and representation, teasing us with details that seem sharp and tangible but refuse to cohere into any definitive image or narrative. … Wood’s paintings offer us glimpses of possibly recognizable things or places, but “human meaning” as [Wallace] Stevens would style it, remains just out of reach.” And as Holland Cotter recently wrote in the New York Times about Brian Wood: “…[Wood] creates a kind of Symbolist world in which emerging into life and being devoured by it are part of the same inexorable process. …the erotic and the spiritual are of a piece.”

Brian Wood‘s solo show of paintings  opens Friday, August 25th and continues through Sun. September 24th.

About Brian Wood:
Brian Wood, a Guggenheim Fellow, is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and is held in many other distinguished public and private collections. More about the artist: http://bit.ly/ccawood

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Structure/Nature

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Structure/Nature : Paintings  by  Claire  Lambe,  Laura  Hexner  and  Mary  Anne  Erickson

 

The ever-growing need for mankind to manage resources for living leads to the building of heroic structures. Human survival demands water, food and housing, and scaffolding, highways and dams are constructions that enable large populations to flourish. At odds with these systems are the destruction of rivers, vistas and natural habitats by concrete pillars, asphalt highways and ill-conceived housing projects. These structures are physically built to dominate and harness nature as well as facilitate the transit of natural resources. However, it is nature’s relentless superpower, entropy, that will ultimately dismantle and destroy all massive efforts to control and re-contour the environment. Dams will run dry, deserts will overtake farmlands and jungles will devour the metal I-beams of empty condominiums.
Artists Claire Lambe, Laura Hexner and Mary Anne Erickson each consider the Pyrrhic victory of human constructions within the backdrop of an immense, relentlessly eroding and infinitely patient natural landscape.

Structure/Nature: Claire LAMB, Laura HEXNER and Mary Anne ERICKSON is on view through April 24, 2016

About the Artists:

Claire Lambe: Born in Ireland, Claire Lambe has a peripatetic artistic focus that reflects her extensive travels and intellectual obsessions. Lately Lambe’s work is concerned with the battle for resources and the lottery that decides who wins a game where one side increasingly holds the majority of tickets.

Laura Hexner: Laura Hexner has been meticulously painting and drawing the often overlooked subjects of everyday life: bridges, dams, telephone poles and highways. Her technical elegance with seemingly mundane subjects creates an abstract drama characteristic of her work.

Mary Anne Erickson: Mary Anne Erickson has long been fascinated by the deterioration and decay of vintage roadside American culture. Her color saturated photo-realist paintings capture the faded bucolic optimism of the Post-War years against the backdrop of a vast and empty western landscape

Twin Arrows © Mary Anne Erickson 2016 oil 24%22 x 18%22
Midas © Claire Lambe 2016 acrylic:gold leaf
Overpass © Laura Hexner 2014

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Work by Goertz, van Lent & Wood

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Trio:  Augustus  Goertz,  Marianne  van  Lent  &  Brian  Wood

Opening Reception Sat. March 5, 2016
on view thru March 27, 2016

“Trio: Augustus Goertz, Marianne van Lent and Brian Wood” is an exhibit of three artists’ abstract meditations of life and its many manifestations. From Brian Wood’s figural/vegetal forms to van Lent’s gestural landscapes and Goertz’ intense textural universes, there is an ambiguity of scale that slides from the cellular to the immense. Each artist contributes to a unique understanding of existence as an eternal shifting of energy from great to small, distant to intimate, fleeting and permanent. This seesawing back and forth in scale allows the viewer the distinct experience of multi-dimensional travel and the compression of simultaneous time.

“Trio: Augustus Goertz, Marianne van Lent and Brian Wood” is co-curated by Ford Crull and Jen Dragon. 

About the Artists:

Augustus Goertz: 
Augustus Goertz’s paintings involve a building of texture and pigment creating a hybrid sculptural surface.  This construction allows the nuances of changing light to participate in the experience of the artwork. The scale of his canvases shifts from aerial to terrestrial, from the vast sweep of a landscape to the miniaturization of a child’s toy. These paradoxical references give the viewer a distinct sensation of swinging from one reality to the next through an environment at once infinitely large and minute. More about the artist: http://bit.ly/ccagoertz

Marianne van Lent:
 Marianne van Lent captures the transcendence between the spiritual and material worlds. There may be suggestions of scale in her paintings with the inclusion of landscape references or biomorphic elements however she bypasses that reality by allowing indeterminate and mystical elements to float through, as if they were thoughts in the mind’s eye, intimate psychological states or the elusive space between worlds. More about the artist: http://bit.ly/ccamvlent

Brian Wood:
The paintings and drawings of Brian Wood create a powerful experience of organic forms in ambiguous scale. Colorful, biological shapes create their own luminosity in the darkness of the canvas or carve a precise, figurative contour from the whiteness of paper. It is not clear if we are encountering massive planetary movements, minute atomic reactions or intimate bodily sensations, nor is it meant to be. Mr. Wood, a Guggenheim Fellow, is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum among many other distinguished public and private collections. More about the artist:http://bit.ly/ccawood

Last Call ©Augustus Goertz 1997
Neverland © Marianne van Lent 2015
Phos ©Brian Wood 2015
Nod © Brian Wood 2012
Locks © Brian Wood 2015 oil on wood
Heartshorn © Brian Wood 2017 oil on canvas
End of the Line © Brian Wood 2017 oil on line

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Mark Thomas Kanter “Creation Myths”

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Mark Thomas Kanter “Creation Myths”

Mark Thomas Kanter’s solo show “Creation Myths” opens with an Artist’s Reception on Saturday, October 3, 6-8pm at Cross Contemporary Art, Saugerties, NY.

        Mark Thomas Kanter’s ambitious oil paintings and ink drawings reference the whole of art history culminating in a 21st century expression of ancient themes. Emerging like the flickering forms from Plato’s cave, Kanter’s work meditates on the tonal variations of the Renaissance, the spacial solidity of Classical Art, the gestural brushwork of Expressionism and melds these traditions in the crucible of the planar manipulations of Modern Art. By invoking the continuum of Art’s history, Kanter reaches for heroic themes that underly all human experience and manifests itself in Myth. However this progress through time and these tales that explain phenomenon are not the goal of Mark Kanter’s painting. Instead it is his painting process that reveals an image which is neither abstract nor figurative. Kanter calls his paintings “configurations” as he weaves historic visual traditions with contemporary improvisational discoveries into a symphony of space and time.
“Creation Myths” opens October 3rd and continues through October 25th.

About Mark Thomas Kanter: 
A recipient of a Helena Rubinstein Foundation grant and a participant in the New York Foundation for the Arts Mark project, Mark Thomas Kanter is well respected as an American painter and instructor. Mr. Kanter has taught in Italy at the International School of Art in Umbria and in the United States at Columbia University, Parson’s School of Design, S.U.N.Y. New Paltz, Purchase College, and American University. He has also been a visiting artist at Dartmouth College, Illinois State University and NYC’s “Studio in a School” program. In 2010, Mr. Kanter curated the exhibit “North of New York: The New York School Generation in the The Hudson Valley Region” for the Kleinert-James Art Center in Woodstock, NY. Mark Thomas Kanter maintains a studio and home in Woodstock together with his wife, artist Heather Hutchison and their son, Dante.

More information about Mark Thomas Kanter: 

Artist’s website:  http://markthomaskanter.com
Roll Magazine Interview (together with Heather Hutchison):http://bit.ly/ccamkrm
Hudson Valley Times Review: http://bit.ly/ccamkhvt

Conversation: Katherine Bowling & Suzannah Lessard

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Conversation Between Katherine Bowling & Suzannah Lessard

On Saturday Sept. 26th at 7pm, writer Suzannah Lessard speaks with Katherine Bowling on the union of memory and the landscape in Ms. Bowling’s current show “The Presence of Leaves” at Cross Contemporary Art. Katherine Bowling’s passion for contemplative landscape spaces has long been an essential trait of her paintings and prints. Inspired by the woodlands of the Hudson Valley and Catskills region, Ms. Bowling’s recent artwork captures the luminosity of golden dappled forests and the quiet shadows of moonlit nights. Writer Suzannah Lessard will steer a lively conversation with the artist about her intentions and techniques and the symbolism of the landscape in Ms. Bowling’s artwork.
About Katherine Bowling’s Solo Show “The Presence of Leaves”
Katherine Bowling’s imagery uses the landscape to create intimate spaces. Inspired by the environment of upstate New York, her woodlands are illuminated by dappled light sparkling through a leafy ceiling. Often Ms. Bowling’s paintings compel the viewer to enter this shimmering forest realm down a pathway away from civilization. Other images introduce the contrast between the decay of manmade structures and the grand, renewable cycle of the surrounding trees. And like Albert Pinkham Ryder before her, Katherine Bowling sometimes boldly paints a portrait of the moon with a silvery light that is in elegant contrast to the habitual golds of her sunlit forests. Although Ms. Bowling’s paintings and prints are in the tradition of the Hudson River School, her expressive technique, quiet symbolism and masterful spatial illusions take the idea of landscape painting into the 21st century. Katherine Bowling’s “The Presence of Leaves” closes Sunday, September 26th.
About Katherine Bowling:
Since her emergence in 1980s, Katherine Bowling has been well respected as an American painter and printmaker. Ms. Bowling has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship. Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum and the Fisher Landau Center in New York City, the Orlando Museum of Contemporary Art and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida as well as the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois and St. John’s University in Santa Fe, New Mexico

More information about the artist can be found:
Artist’s website:  http://katherinebowling.com/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Bowling
NYTimes Art Review: http://bit.ly/ccakbnyt
About Suzannah Lessard:
Suzannah Lessard is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (1996). Ms. Lessard has taught at Columbia School of the Arts, Wesleyan University, The New School, George Mason University, George Washington University, and Goucher College MFA in Creative Non-fiction.  She was one of the first editors of the Washington Monthly and a staff writer at The New Yorker Magazine. She has also published in New York Times Magazine, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, Wilson Quarterly and Harvard Design. Suzannah Lessard is the recipient of the Whiting Award and the Mark Lynton History Prize as well as a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship at George Washington University. Her latest book, T”he View From a Small Mountain: Reading the American Landscape in the Twenty-First Century” is scheduled to be published in 2016.

Susan Copich “Domestic Bliss”

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Susan Copich “Domestic Bliss”

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Since Susan Copich’s first exhibit of “Domestic Bliss” in 2014 (Umbrella Gallery, NYC), her photographs rapidly travelled over the internet generating tremendous response. Images from the exhibit flashed across countless computer screens worldwide. The elegant scenes depicting suburban privilege are at first glance banalities often found in lifestyle magazines. Like advertisements for an ideal life, the photographic quality and composition mimics a marketing illusion. However, the carefully composed veneer is part of Copich’s message: a fur coat, a swimming pool, an elegant dining room with picture windows, a dream kitchen are all a staged set prepared for actors posed in a “tableau vivant”. But the challenging gaze of the photograph’s female protagonist demands closer examination revealing darker ironies: the pain of parenting, the cruelty of intimacy, the ache of ambivalence, the recklessness of desire, and ultimately the loss of illusion. To engage with these photographs in a gallery, and not through the Internet, is the best way to understand the irony of Ms. Copich’s storytelling. “Domestic Bliss” is a mirage as the moment is imagined while the story-line continues to roll past the stills. The pretty blonde woman staring out at the viewer, is the only moral compass that is constant throughout the photo series. She challenges us to experience the discomfort of the tableau and dares us to recoil from the scene. She presents the taboos of our society and acts as the silent narrator of a morality play frozen by the camera’s eye. The over arching lie of Susan Copich’s “Domestic Bliss” tells a harsh truth by peeling back the veneer of civilization to reveal the danger of denial.
Susan Copich writes about her work: “I dwell in the dark thoughts and recesses of my mind to create character and subject…(and) navigate both my own personal imperatives as woman, artist, mother and wife, as well as those – personal, social, and cultural -that are imposed by
others. My work is my commentary on how a family can live a public life that is far from their private life, even within the family; how secrets are kept, coddled and nurtured”

About Susan Copich:

Since graduating Ohio State University (BFA, 1991), Susan Copich has had professional careers as a modern dancer, teacher and actress. Looking to explore new forms of art and self-expression, Copich returned to academia at New York City’s International Center of Photography. While at ICP, Ms.Copich began laying the mental framework for what would become her photographic series “Domestic Bliss”.The series gives voice to Copich’s inner “darkness” while examining family life in a humorous context. Like many celebrated contemporary artists, Copich’s art rarely inspires a moderate response. Copich’s journey to explore universal truths are celebrated by some and shunned by others. Susan Copich lives in Upstate, NY where she resides with her husband and two daughters.
More information about the artist can be found:
Artist’s website: http://susancopich.com
Media reviews/Interviews (selected):
Daily Mail: http://bit.ly/ccascop1
Slate: http://bit.ly/ccascop2
BoredPanda.com: http//bit.ly/ccascop3
Huffington Post: http://bit.ly/ccascop4
Bust.com: http://bit.ly/ccascop6
Beautiful Decay: http://bit.ly/ccascop7

CATHERINE HOWE SOLO SHOW

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Catherine  Howe

Supreme  Fiction:  Monotypes  &  Mylar  Paintings 

Solo  Exhibition  July  3  –  26,  2015

Supreme Fiction: Monotypes and Mylar Paintings by Catherine Howe opens with an Artist’s Reception July 35-8pm at Cross Contemporary Art, Saugerties and runs through July 27th, 2015. Inspired by the luscious paintings of the Baroque era, Catherine Howe’s riotous compositions bring still lifes and botanicals into the 21st century. Her exuberantly expressive brushwork  and attention to surface create vibrant works out of uniquely contemporary materials such as carborundum grit and polyester. The luminous results resist being categorized as solely, drawings, paintings, or prints. David Ebony writes “Howe’s still lifes…are anything but still. The images seem to be imploding or exploding, in a constant state of flux.” Michele C. Cone says about Ms. Howe: “Howe’s evocative paintings are not about still life per se, but about the naming of things transposed into paint, and the magical interaction between medium, memory and perception.”Supreme Fiction: Monotypes & Mylar Paintings by Catherine Howe” opens July 3-26.
About Catherine Howe: Catherine Howe received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo in 1983. She has been reviewed in many publications including Art in America, Artforum, Art Critical, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. For over twenty years, Ms.Howe has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe  including shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, MoMA PS 1 in New York, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Catherine Howe is on the faculty of the New York Academy of Art in New York City.More information about the artist can be found: 
Artist’s website:  http://catherinehoweartist.com
Video interview: http://bit.ly/ccachow1

Garry Nichols “Water Witch”

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Garry  Nichols:  Water  Witch

 

Garry Nichols solo exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture opens Sat, March 7 at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY. Mr. Nichols is a prolific artist who plays with the paradox of space: what should be big is very small and what should be small, is enormous creating a fantastic distortion that torques pictorial space. The feeling of far-off lands, of maybe even the most far-off land of Nichol’s native Tasmania lends his art a sense of adventure and discovery of a new state of nature.
Garry Nichols takes over the gallery and transforms the space into an enviroment of nautical and botanical fantasy reflecting his far-ranging fascination with water divining, sailing ships, tropical plantlife and aboriginal art. Adrian Frost writes: “Nichols is now in his stride. Ultimately an epic painter, a man of the long vision, the big picture, he is intimate with painterly detail yet always pushing for the grand yet haunting vision”. Cross Contemporary Art director Jen Dragon says of Garry Nichols “Mr. Nichols is a wordless storyteller whose art follows the flow of form much as the divining rod discovers the unseen stream of subterranean water. Its exciting to surrender the gallery for an installation of such breadth and ambition!” In an interview with Guy Trebay for the NYTimes, Garry Nichols say of his own work “I have no plan when I go into the studio, I just let the drawings flow.” Just like the divining rod also known as the water-witch.

About Garry Nichols:
Garry Nichols, work can be found in many museum and public collections throughout the world including Samuel P. Harn Museum University of Florida, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Burnie Museum, University of Newcastle Australia,Osaka Hilton Hotels, Westpac Bank, ARTBank. A recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Gottlieb Foundation Awards, the artist has shown at numerous institutions including The Brooklyn Museum, Marymount Manhattan and Kean University. Most recently, Mr. Nichols’ paintings were published in “I Don’t Poem” an anthology of poetry and art edited by Claudia La Rocco. Garry Nichols currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Garry Nichols currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
More information about the artist can be found:
Video interview: http://vimeo.com/79713584
Artist’s website: http://garrynichols.com

About Cross Contemporary Art: Cross Contemporary Art is a gallery dedicated to showing mid-career and established artists who have a connection to New York City, Hudson Valley and Catskills region. Open Thurs through Mon 12-6, Tues and Wed by appointment or chance. 81 Partition st Saugerties, NY 12477 Phone Gallery Director Jen Dragon 845.399.9751 for more information

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sm_ship_spiral_by_garry_nichols_oil_on_canvas

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Heather Hutchison: Here Now

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Heather Hutchison exhibits her latest work into the inquiry of light and transparency at Cross Contemporary Art, Saugerties, NY with an opening reception for the artist Sat Dec 6, 6-8pm. Utilizing bent Plexiglas, video installations or paint on transparent paper, Ms. Hutchison captures the flickering moments of natural light. Cindy Moore writes:  “Hutchison’s paintings are impossible to experience through reproductions. No matter how skilled the photographer, they cannot be captured in a fixed moment.  The work is responsive in a way alien to traditional painting: as the light shifts so does the hue.”  
Relocated from NYC to the Hudson Valley, Heather Hutchison has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants  (Pollock-Krasner, Gottleib Foundation),and her work is in many prestigious collections including the The Brooklyn Museum, Hammer Museum and the Smithsonian Institution. 
More information about the artist can be found:

Exhibition Essay, “boxed light bodies” by George Quasha http://bit.ly/hhcca4
video interview: http://bit.ly/hhutcca1
Artist’s website:  http://heatherhutchison.com

Sleepy Golden
Non-Specific Pacific
More Like the Sky on A Cloudy Day
Another Day
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Richard Bosman by Eleanor Heartney

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Richard Bosman: Raw Cuts

Since he first emerged on the art scene in the early 1980s, Richard Bosman has been a master of what he terms the “ambiguous narrative”. In his early days, he was associated with the neo-expressionist movement, and gained attention and notoriety for loosely painted figural tableaux that often featured disturbing and violent scenarios – among them people drowning, brandishing weapons, and graphically perpetrating or suffering carnage. Though critics linked the works to an environment of crime and violence that surrounded New York’s East Village milieu which birthed neo expressionism, in fact, Bosman’s sources were comic books, Kung Fu and other forms of pop culture.

Today, the narratives in his works remain ambiguous, but they are quieter, and more freighted with psychological significance. While he continues to paint, he is also an accomplished printmaker. The works in this show reveal his facility with woodblock and linoleum relief. He notes that for him, painting is an additive process while printmaking is a reductive one, as he cuts away at the block to create his image. The result, as this series reveals, are simple, but potent images that encourage multiple readings. Still drawn to sources in popular culture, which he now gathers not only from films and comic books, but also from the internet, Bosman focuses here on closely cropped scenes full of foreboding, sexual tension, and unexplained anticipation. While there is no clear plot, viewers find themselves linking images to create any number of open-ended storylines. -Eleanor Heartney
Richard Bosman’s “Raw Cuts” a collection of woodcuts printed by the artist himself is on view at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties through Nov 3, 2014

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