Work

NIGHT FALLS with Katherine Bowling, Jared Handelsman, Portia Munson & Paul Mutimear

August 20, 2016 by Jen Dragon

NIGHT FALLS with Katherine Bowling, Jared Handelsman, Portia Munson & Paul Mutimear

Group Exhibition August 27th – Sept. 18, 2016
Artist Reception Sat, August 27th, 5-8pm
Cross Contemporary Art,
81 Partition St Saugerties, New York 12477

Night Falls is a group show featuring drawings and photographs inspired by the night and what can and cannot be seen. When the sun goes down, most of the world goes to sleep but even in the dark, life continues as plants breathe, nocturnal animals search for food and people dream. Jared HANDELSMAN and Paul MUTIMEAR use photographic processes to capture what is visible under sudden illumination. Moths, plants, the light of the moon and car headlights are often the only evidence of life in their otiose worlds. Drawing with vine charcoal, Katherine BOWLING tracks the dark shadows cast by unruly plants. By daylight, these plants take the pleasing form of flowers yet their negative forms cast a sinister opposite on paper. Portia MUNSON explores life’s dark side in her digital scans of deceased birds and flowers and in her sculptural assemblages of bones and cradles. Ms. Munson’s digital prints evoke the Victorian tradition of honoring the beauty of past life while her sculptural assemblage of bones in a baby carriage serves as an ironic “memento mori” of the close proximity of birth and death. Between the percussion of the photographic moment and the elongated study of drawing and arranging and scanning forms, “Night Falls” presents a range of materials and temporal studies of the unconscious life and of the life of the night.

Night Falls with Katherine BOWLING, Jared HANDELSMAN, Portia MUNSON and Paul MUTINEER opens Sat. August 27th and is on view through Sept. 18th

About The ARTISTS:
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, as well as many institutions and museums throughout the United States.
Jared HANDELSMAN: In Night Falls, Jared Handelsman will be showing his large scale landscape photograms. Handelsman has had solo exhibitions at Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, NY, The Center for Photography, Woodstock NY, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Great Barrington, MA., and Rockland County Museum, Nyack, NY., Handelsman has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, The Fine Arts Center in Provincetown and Vassar College.
Portia MUNSON: Portia Munson works in photography, painting, sculpture & installation, a concern for the environment is an overarching theme in her work. She has shown her work in major public and private exhibition spaces since the early 1990s. Munson is represented by PPOW gallery, NYC. Recent public installations include light-boxs at the Bryant Park subway station for the MTA(New York), a permanent MTA installation at Fort Hamilton Parkway station in Brooklyn (“D” line). And a large piece at the Albany International Airport (Albany, N.Y.). Munson has taught at New York University, Yale School of Art, Vassar College and SUNY Purchase.
Paul MUTIMEAR: Paul Mutimear is a multi-dimensional artist who uses many tools to investigate the world. Starting out as a musician (performing as Paul Brittan), Mutimear has been drawn to photography as a means of capturing the sudden and unrehearsed moments as he walks through life. He has worked with Oehme Graphics to produce an edition of photo-etchings on paper as well as digitally printing his own photographs on archival paper.

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Ford Crull Solo Painting Exhibit “Red”

June 25, 2016 by Jen Dragon

Ford Crull Solo Show “Red”

June 25,- July 17th, 2016

“Red” is a survey of contemporary symbolist oil and mixed media works by painter Ford Crull that are united by the color Red. Each work of art is a meditation on the power of this primary color as it supports, weaves, balances and directs the energy and composition of Crull’s art .The exhibit ranges from older works to new paintings, and within a variety of styles from different points in the artist’s career.Ford Crull’s paintings and drawings, the symbolism of the color Red, as well as other basic cultural signs and archetypes, have been obsessions he has explored throughout his career as an artist. According to Crull, Red is an especially provocative and powerful color. Throughout time and through every culture, Red is the pigment of violent forces: war, blood, fire and even Hell. However, Red is also the joyful color of Christmas and of valentines. In Indian cosmology, Red, as the first chakra, represents the life force and foundation for all things. In Ford Crull’s paintings, Red draws upon any and all of these ideas on works covered in open-ended symbols.
These iconographic signs are at once personal and universal such as crosses, hearts, words, numbers and other archetypes found in a range of cultures throughout the centuries. As Jonathan Goodman writes, “Crull has been successful in his combination of the old and the new, demonstrating how an image can call up the past and at the same time be responsive to present conditions in painting. Art like this needs to be taken seriously—not only because of the implications of the image, but also because very few painters are trying to build a bridge across time.”

About Ford Crull:
Mr. Crull’s work can be found in many important museum and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Wash. DC, Dayton Art Institute, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Al), as well as numerous international and national corporate and private collections. Ford Crull lives and works in New York City and Woodstock NY.

Slideshow

Structure/Nature

April 8, 2016 by Jen Dragon

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

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Work by Goertz, van Lent & Wood

March 2, 2016 by Jen Dragon

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

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Trialogue I: Paintings

February 1, 2016 by Jen Dragon

Trialogue I : Jackson Dembar, Ruth Edwy & Suzanne Rees

It can be argued that Abstract Painting is the most representational of all painting expressions because the subject matter is not a response to the outside world but literally the reality of paint itself. Jackson Dembar, Ruth Edwy and Suzanne Rees explore the dynamism and reality of paint in this group show: Trialogue I.

These area artists have long lived and worked in New York State and their commitment to painting has largely been outside mainstream art marketplaces. For decades, these three have been committed to the goal of painting for its own sake. The result is work that is about a pure and personal vision expressed in color, form and light. “Trialogue I” is co-curated by Alan Goolman and Jen Dragon.

About the Artists:

Jackson Dembar: Although he holds an MBA from Wharton, Jackson Dembar soon found that success in business paled in comparison to the experience of painting. Mr. Dembar’s decades as an artist covers an exhaustive range of materials united by a common theme of light, color, form, surface and passion. The painter says about his work: “I am the paint” and in essence, each painting is a self-portrait. He further writes: “Art is not about pleasing the potential buyer. It is about producing something new, communicative, vital, in that it can hit the viewer in the gut and allow them to see something they have never seen before. It is about going a step further in art history, showing understanding of life, the world around us, the times we live in.”

Ruth Edwy: Ruth Edwy (BFA, MFA Pratt) has been painting in her studio in the Catskills since 1972. Her atmospheric surfaces are often punctuated by geometric edges creating a spatial tension between what is permanent and impermanent. Ms. Edwy writes: “When I begin a painting, I don’t always have a particular idea or emotion that I want to express. Rather, I have the need to paint, per se, and from the act itself–the physical gesture, the movement of the brush on the canvas, the color and shape and line that begin to come from my hand and body–the painting begins to emerge as a coherent entity.”

Suzanne Rees: Suzanne Rees (BFA Parsons, MFA Maryland Institute College of Art) approaches painting as a sculptor in that the illusion of material space is her starting point. Allowing the marks to determine the forms, each painting becomes a study of density and atmosphere, of weight and balance. Ms. Rees says: “I like to keep my work on the edge of representation with regards to space, as well as image. Light is the element that punctuates the work for me. From flat space I like to see moments of dimension materialize. They feel hyper-real. I’m looking for the quality of a dream in which objects, space and people are infused with an emotional meaning, amplified beyond what is experienced in everyday life.”

“Trialogue I: Paintings by Jackson Dembar, Ruth Edwy & Suzanne Rees” opens Februry 6 and continues through February 28th, 2016

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FOUR FORCES

December 28, 2015 by Jen Dragon

Mike Cockrill
In Retrospect

The War Between the States: The Confederacy vs. Arnold Palmer © Mike Cockrill 2016

Opening Reception Sat. May 6th
Cross Contemporary Art
99 Partition St. Saugerties, New York 12477
on view thru May.28, 2017

GALLERY HOURS: Thurs- Mon 12-5pm

Cross Contemporary Art inaugurates its new 1,000-square-foot space at 99 Partition Street, Saugerties, NY, with a survey of paintings, works on paper and iron sculpture by Mike Cockrill.

The exhibition will include over 40 drawings that trace the artist’s evolution over the past 20 years from his gun-wielding clown-killer girls of the ‘90s to his recent modernist drawings and collages of fragmented female figures.

One of the most frequent themes of Cockrill’s drawings is the relationship between artists and their subjects; they are explorations of the moments of creation. In several drawings, girls stand at easels and draw clowns while in other drawings the girls themselves become the studio models for clowns and as well as baboons and chimpanzees who sit at easels with poised brushes studying their human subjects. His large new painting, “New Mom,” (2014), continues this theme in a monumental scale.

Cockrill’s never-before-seen sculptures, “Iron Men,” relate to his Existential Man series of paintings; cast in iron from styrofoam constructions and given a rich patina, Cockrill’s sculptures seem to rise and crumble at the same time.

Blending both the playful and the serious, Cockrill’s challenging art continues to foster compelling conversations about social values and artistic expression.

Mike Cockrill has had over 20 solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally. His paintings were included in the 2016 Outlaw Bible of American Art, published by Last Gasp.

MIKE COCKRILL: In Retrospect opens with a reception for the artist on Saturday, May 6, 5-8pm and runs through May 28, 2017.

New Mom © Mike Cockrill 2014 oil on canvas

Artist and Model (Monkey Shoes) © Mike Cockrill graphite, ink, charcoal on paper

Iron Men © Mike Cockrill 2016 cast iron, wire, patina

Shira Toren “Eternal Return”

November 27, 2015 by Jen Dragon

Shira Toren “Eternal Return”

Shira Toren’s solo show “Eternal Return” is an exhibit of abstract paintings and drawings that refer to vast patterns and dimensional space. Painted on plaster substrates applied to canvas, these luminous images serve as a spiritual template for the real world. Ms. Toren uses the velocity of twining, travelling or precipitating marks to create universes that are at once vast and minute. The same way many cells make up a living organism, stars create the constellations and human populations collectively make history, Shira Toren’s artwork refers to the endless consolidation of the many into the one.

Shira Toren “Eternal Return” is on view from November 28th- December 27th with a reception for the artist on Sat. Dec 5, 6-8pm

About Shira Toren: Shira Toren is an American-Israeli artist with a long history working with textures and forms. Born in Tel-Aviv, she moved to New York City to study fine art and design receiving her BFA from the Pratt Institute and an Associate Degree in Art Therapy from The New School. Ms. Toren has also studied at The Art Students League as well as IS183 School of Art in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Shira Toren is a recipient of The Henry Matisse Estate Scholarship and attended the New York Foundation for the Arts Bootcamp in 2011. Ms. Toren maintains studios in New York City and Great Barrington, Ma.

More about Shira Toren:
Artist’s website: http://www.shiratoren.com
New York Times mention: http://bit.ly/ccastnyt

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Iain Machell “Platte Clove Lens”

October 25, 2015 by Jen Dragon

Iain Machell “Platte Clove Lens”

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Iain Machell is committed to form and meaning. Sometimes these forms make words that play with concept and context. Sometimes they manifest themselves as blurred digital images seizing motion at the expense of clarity. And sometimes abstract form is explored in an intricate 16th century engraved style of ink laboriously crosshatched on paper. The most recent explorations comprise the exhibit “Platte Clove Lens” and are a result of a July residency in 2015 at Platte Clove, in the Catskill Mountains. Emerging from the tradition of landscape art that romanticizes nature, Machell instead focuses on the “dark, twisted, dangerous and angry power” nature has over humans, and the troubled relationship humans have with nature. The dark woods and blurred streams that infuse Machell’s multiple studies hint of the mystery of deep, burrowing spaces and the sharp, fleeting nature of light. Iain Machell writes about “Platte Clove Lens” that it is “A visual reaction to the idyllic, romanticized landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. Platte Clove was a favourite location of these artists and I chose it deliberately to rattle their cages.” By invoking the past, Machell propels the landscape concept forward into the 21st century.
“Platte Clove Lens” opens October 31st and continues through November 22nd.

About Iain Machell:
Originally from Scotland, Iain Machell studied at Grays School of Art and received his MFA from SUNY Albany. A well-respected visual artist and teacher, Mr. Machell was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and is currently a Professor of Studio Arts and holds the position of Chair of Art, Design, Fashion, Music, Theatre and Communication Department at SUNY Ulster, Stone Ridge NY. Mr. Machell has been a visiting artist and lecturer at numerous colleges and universities including Bennington College, Parsons School of Art, University of Massachusetts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ball State University, SUNY at Albany, West Virginia University and Montserrat College of Art. Iain Machell was also the recipient of a NYSCA stipend and was a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Finalist (Sculpture). Iain Machell’s drawings, book projects, paintings and sculptures have been shown in galleries and institutions throughout the United States and United Kingdom notably The Drawing Center, The Sculpure Center and the Center for Book Arts in New York City and a handmade book is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art/Franklin Furnace/Artist Book Collection.

More information about Iain Machell can be found:

Artist’s website: http://www.iainmachell.com

New York Times Art Review: http://bit.ly/ccaimnyt

Chronogram Magazine: http://bit.ly/ccaimchron

Mark Thomas Kanter “Creation Myths”

September 29, 2015 by Jen Dragon

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

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Conversation: Katherine Bowling & Suzannah Lessard

September 22, 2015 by Jen Dragon

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.

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NIGHT FALLS with Katherine Bowling, Jared Handelsman, Portia Munson & Paul Mutimear

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Ford Crull Solo Show “Red”

June 25,- July 17th, 2016

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

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Trio: Augustus Goertz, Marianne van Lent & Brian Wood

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Trialogue I : Jackson Dembar, Ruth Edwy & Suzanne Rees

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