The
Hudson Valley has a thriving creative community. We benefit from our proximity to
New York City through the number of talented artists who are attracted to the
area. They live quietly among us, a blend of long time residents, new arrivals,
emerging and established. Engaged with conceptual and formal considerations,
the five artists participating in Orange Alert 3D have received significant
recognition outside of Orange County. PUG Projects is excited to exhibit their
work close to home. This is the good kind of Orange Alert.
PUG Projects had its first exhibition eight
years ago across from the Yellow Bird Gallery on Newburgh’s newly opened Front
Street. Now many more artists have relocated here from high rent areas south
and east of us. Orange County, particularly Newburgh, has almost reached the
“critical mass” of artists that our neighbors enjoy. Certainly Newburgh has the
cheap studios and easy ferry access to attract them. PUG Projects intends to
encourage the trend. By staging
exhibits in unrented or transitional spaces, it draws artists and art lovers to
potential galleries and studios. By exhibiting artwork not commonly seen
in the area, PUG Projects brings attention to the diversity of art being made
here in Orange County.
Gerardo Castro, co-owner of Newburgh Art Supply,
came to Orange County about eight years ago from Jersey City. He still teaches
art at New Jersey City University. He is known internationally for his
colorfully detailed paintings that combine embroidered elements with beautifully
rendered figures. He often pulls imagery from his Afro-Cuban heritage, using
symbols from Santeria and hybrids forms of Catholicism. Densely layered, his
paintings revel in visual complexity. For Pug Projects, however, less is more.
Castro is exhibiting several collares de
mazos, ceremonial sashes, which he painstaking threads using glass beads.
Differing from elekes, a related
beaded necklace, these beautifully ornate objects have long layers of beaded
fringe that suggest the soundsuits of Nick Cave. The sashes are displayed in
radial bursts of color, becoming circular sculptures. During the opening, Castro
wears one of the mazos so
viewers can hear the soft percussion of this work.
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| collares de mazos |
Bruce Chapin made a career shift in 2004 that allowed him to dedicate himself full time to
his creative pursuits. He is a consummate woodworker, and exhibits his
sculptures throughout the United States. Chapin exhibits several pieces here,
including a selection from his series Reliquary
and Seven Deadly Sins. Perhaps the
most striking quality of his work is its engagement with the darker, more
absurd aspects of the examined life. Chapin finds inspiration in the fertile
ground between the sacred and profane. Many of Chapin’s pieces open to reveal
figures or spaces inside the bellies of the sculptures. (Viewers are welcome to
carefully touch these.) For example,
in Infinite Passage, the vaginal opening reveals a figure positioned for
passage, yet one senses this is the end of the journey, not the beginning. When
opened, the gold inner doors suggest wings and thus link death to
(re)birth.
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| Moonboy Dreaming |
Daniel Mack also made a career shift toward a
more creative endeavor that brought him to Warwick 30 years ago. When he isn't teaching at the Omega Institute, he is the
artist behind Rustic Furnishings, making architectural installations and
furniture using natural materials. From these, PUG Projects selected three
stools for the gestural quality of their legs. They evoke the lightness of step
of walking deer. A selection of Mack’s Anima
figures welcomes viewers to the exhibition. Reminiscent of Antony Gormley’s Field or Ana Mendieta’s silhouettes,
these small objects are fashioned from bark collected along the Hudson River.
Mack finds the figure held within the bark. He sees them as having their own
agency in terms of form, placement and even display. He listens, observes and
then creates. In addition, Mack contributes several twig sculptures. Like the
stools and the anima, these works capture
sentient movement found within wood.
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| Triple Anima |
Stefana McClure recently moved to the area from
Brooklyn although she is originally from Lisburn, Northern Ireland. She
investigates verbal meaning, or the obfuscation of it, by transforming words
into visual forms that are quietly beautiful yet almost entirely illegible. McClure
draws inspiration from sources as seemingly disparate as Melville’s Moby Dick, Japanese anime and the poetry
of Seamus Heaney. Language, an abstraction itself, can take many forms.
McClure seems intent on making this clear. While the textual meaning of her
source is lost, McClure does communicate an overwhelming sense of time. Her
works are the result of a performance, a labor-intensive translation from
linear time to a circuitous moment. For example, McClure cut out each written
line from a book of Moby Dick and
attached these strips of paper end to end to create a long “thread” of words.
She then carefully wound the words like yarn to create a spherical ball held in
place by a pin. The time it took her to make this work and its visual elegance
instantly arrest the viewer’s attention. She creates a distilled experience of information.
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| Map of the World |
Judy Sigunick uses her daughter’s warehouse, this
exhibition space, as a part time studio where she creates her ceramic
sculptures. Concurrently with this exhibit, she is showing at Broadfoot and Broadfoot in the Lower East
Side. Like all the artists here, Sigunick is completely engaged with the unique
qualities of her medium. Even when glazed, her work has a raw, almost painterly
surface that retains the presence of the artist’s hand. Her clay figures seem
to have emerged from the primordial goo, glistening and unclean. Exotic animals
and people inhabit a space evoked as much by their color and texture as by whom
they might be. While some of her pieces are reminiscent of Daisy Youngblood,
her more recent work is distinctly her own. Not quite marauding Carthage
warriors or fairytale maidens, Sigunick’s figures transport viewers into a
world entirely of her creation.
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| Roaming |
I offer my sincere gratitude to all the artists for
participating in Orange Alert 3D. It has been my pleasure to spend time
looking, thinking and writing about your work. I also thank Orange Arts of
Orange County Tourism for financial support for PUG Projects. Many thanks as
well go to Ellen Sigunick and Alice Vaughan for opening their space to all of
us. Jackie
Skrzynski, curator
Beyond her
studio practice, Jackie Skrzynski is interested in projects that bring art to
the community in creative ways. She started the Pop-Up Gallery in 2005 as a curatorial vehicle. In 2009, Skrzynski began the year-long collaborative performance Silent Walks on the Half-Moon. She exhibits her
drawings and paintings extensively, most recently at Theo Ganz Studio in
Beacon, NY. Her work was part of the exhibit, Art about Motherhood: The Last Taboo, curated by Diana Quinby, in
Avallon, France. Skrzynski was nominated for the Painters and Sculptors Grant
from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, received a NYFA SOS grant and three Orange
Arts Individual Artist grants. Her work has been published in 2River View, Reconciling Art and Mothering, Ten
Words and One Shot, and The Gathering
of the Tribes Magazine. She teaches drawing and painting at Ramapo College
of New Jersey.
