Curator's Statement for Orange Alert 3D

 
 

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.

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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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.