(s)mother stays home 2020

 an (online) exhibition curated by Anna Adler at Bethany Arts Community
May 8th – June 7th, 2020
Virtual Opening (via Zoom) : Friday, May 8th, 7-8pm
(s)mother gallery + studio open by appt

This exhibition idea came to me while in the throes of early motherhood, at one month or so of my baby being born…As my past life slipped away, somewhere in my desperate attempt to hold on, fighting off symptoms of severe postpartum anxiety and depression, somewhere amidst the joy and terror of this new little life intertwined with mine, somewhere in the midst of all the milk and shit that comes with having a newborn, I thought of this exhibition — a collection of the creative hearts and minds of the womxn (some of whom I know personally) who have done this whole birthing and raising another human into the world thing, and who realize how utterly absurd it is.

The idea has since then evolved into an exhibition centered around the idea of normalizing and de-romanticizing the dialogue and experience of motherhood, of mothering, of having (or not having) a mother, and of having, (or not having) children — with this there is a broader exploration of what it means to mother (verb) and the potential intensity, love, loss, and trauma that lies within this experience.

This exhibition is a document and examination of the relationships that shift and form between mothers and children, between partners, between people. A collection of work devoted to the humanity and humanness of (the act/state of) mothering — joy, wonder, beauty, abjection, sadness, sleep deprivation, grief, and loss — because life and death exist in very close proximity, there is the loss of a baby, the loss of oneself, because with new life also often comes loss (both physical and emotional). There is the balancing act of that conflict of feelings, that is so often too complicated to put into words, and some of which is visually manifested here, in this collection of work (hopefully).

There are the motherless children and childless mothers, there are fathers who are mothers and mothers who are fathers, there are parents and partners, and then there is this earth, mother of us all.

Put most simply, this is a curated exhibition of contemporary artists whose work explores the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of motherhood, their own, or that of others; motherhood as a romantic patriarchal structure, motherhood as untethered from traditional gender norms and existing in the more fluid non-binary realm. Motherhood as a noun and a verb, and especially motherhood as a myth.*

In its most complex form this is an expansion of the definition of what it means to be a “mother” (yes “mother” in quotes), to mother (verb), and sometimes to (s)mother.

The exhibition features drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, text, and mixed media, and will be accompanied by readings, performances, and group meetings centered around mothering (open to all).

Text by Anna Adler

*We recognize the importance of inclusivity and relatability. Not all mothers identify as women and not all parents identify as mothers and fathers. Parenthood and specifically birth parenthood, is experienced by a myriad of beautiful identities within and beyond the binary spectrum. Text by Jess Russell

Featured artists: Julia Whitney Barnes, Grace Wilentz, Hannah Walsh, Erin Sweeny, Rakel Stammer, Jackie Skrzynski, Ahna Serendren, Laurie Olinder, Jessica Pinsky, Steven Paneccasio, Kacie Lyn Martinez, Sahar Muradi, Julie Mihaly, Maria Driscoll McMahon, Char McCutcheon, Ashley Lyon, Liz Luisaida, Peter Leeds, Rita Leduc, Maria Kondratiev, Audra Kizina, Kate Starbuck Elliot, Sarah Drury, Mirenka Cechova, Alta Buden, Whitney Browne, Jo-Ann Brody, Jessica Bottalico, Irina Arnaut

“Now there is an added layer — an exhibition about mothering in a particularly precarious time, a global pandemic. The idea of caring and loving in a time of crisis, the collective trauma of our society and social fabric coming undone. Social distancing, masking, isolation, grief, loss; a ripple effect of multiple realities. There are our collective mothers, the essential workers, those on the front lines, those in the trenches. There are those we have lost and will lose, including ourselves, and the ways that we have found to process and cope. There is all this and more…Wanting to incorporate some of this current dialogue into the exhibition we altered the exhibition format to include (s)mother studio — a space where artists and viewers can physically engage in a creative process (be it solitary, by taking turns, or in small groups) — an attempt to bring the conversation up to speed into this precarious yet present moment.”

Anna Adler, April 2020

Statement
Julia Whitney Barnes’ work is multi-disciplinary, executed in a variety of media from oil paintings, ceramic sculptures, murals, drawings, etchings, and site-specific installations. Her boldly colored paintings are based on a variety of source images that are conjoined into unusual landscapes and spaces. A hybrid of interiors, exteriors, realities and fictions, the resulting works combine her drawings and photographs from actual travels along with imagery from places she desires to visit. Whitney Barnes works in the style of many Hudson River School artists, who created composite paintings based on sketches from several days and locations distilled into a single image.
—
These three paintings are from my “Domestic Bliss” series that I painted of our home, and are meaningful to me. The one with the pink clouds “May Day” (study) was the first of the series, and I made it during my first Mother’s Day as a mother. Each of the elements in the painting(s) is significant in our lives. “Dear Dahlia” painting was named for our doula.

The cyanotypes are of the Magnolia tree and flowers where I buried the placenta from my first child, my daughter Magnolia.

Bio
Julia Whitney Barnes was born in Newbury, VT. After two decades in Brooklyn, Julia moved up to the Hudson Valley, where she lives with her photographer husband and two young children. Her work is multi-disciplinary, executed in a variety of media from oil paintings, ceramic sculptures, murals, drawings, etchings, and site-specific installations. Symbolic objects, flora and the domestic spaces of her Poughkeepsie home and neighbors’ homes populate Julia’s current oil paintings and drawings on Mylar, in addition to imagery from past travels. Her boldly colored paintings are based on a variety of source images that are conjoined into unusual interiors and landscapes. Other influences include patterned surfaces from around the world: stained-glass windows, traditional quilts, and paintings from every time period. Her maternal grandmother was a quilter as were several women generations before her and Whitney Barnes grew up looking at their handmade quilts. Raised by a UCC minister, she spent time playing in churches throughout her childhood and as an adult continues to seek a variety of religious and secular buildings adorned with stained glass. Whitney Barnes works in the style of many Hudson River School artists who created composite paintings based on sketches from several days and locations distilled into a single image. One of the motivating factors to live in the Hudson Valley was proximity to the sites of former brickyards for work on her long-term public artwork “Hudson River of Bricks.” She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and her MFA from Hunter College. You can view more of her work at www.juliawhitneybarnes.com and on Instagram @juliawhitneybarnes.

Captions
Julia Whitney Barnes, ”May Day/Domestic Bliss”(study), ink and watercolor on paper, dimensions, date, NFS
Julia Whitney Barnes, “Dear Dahlia/Domestic Bliss”, ink and oil on mylar, 33” x 43”, 2017, $5000 framed
Julia Whitney Barnes, “Autumn Porch/Domestic Bliss”, ink and oil on mylar, 43” x 33”, 2017, $5000 framed
Julia Whitney Barnes, “Botany of Poughkeepsie/Cyanotype 2”, paper collage, pigment, and encaustic wax on wood panel, 12” x 16”, 2019, $1450 framed
Julia Whitney Barnes, “Botany of Poughkeepsie/Cyanotype 7”, paper collage, pigment, and encaustic wax on wood panel, 12” x 16”, 2019, $1450 framed

Bio
Grace Wilentz is the author of Holding Distance (Green Bottle Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Irish, British and American journals including Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, The Seneca Review, The American Poetry Journal, Magma, The Harvard Advocate, and The Irish Times. She is a recent recipient of the literature bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. Grace has taught creative writing at University College Dublin and in diverse community settings.

Website: gracewilentz.com

Statement
This project has been compiled in the periphery of new motherhood. The form and content speaks to the tools, time, and worries at hand.

Bio
Hannah Walsh was born and raised in rural Indiana. She is, among other things, an artist and educator and is raising her daughter in Newburgh, New York. www.hannahwalsh.net

Captions
Hannah Walsh, Poison Ivy, saddle stitched booklet (essay and images), 5” x 7”, 2020
Hannah Walsh, Poison Ivy, saddle stitched booklet (essay and images), 5” x 7”, 2020

Statement
While pregnant with Josephine, I thought a lot about movement related to water. Swimming while pregnant and the calm of being suspended in that water while carrying another being suspended in her own body of water/fluid. The strange abstractions of ultrasounds as we tried to make out her body and face, one ultrasound in particular where the tech was looking for a certain type of movement on the screen for what felt like an eternity but was actually 30 minutes and how the shadowy image on the screen looked like sun streaming through water. The calm of that image despite the anxiety produced by waiting and straining to see a movement in her diaphragm that was supposed to “look like breathing” though she was swimming in fluid and wondering why.

Bio
Integrating the use of lens-based media, site-specific investigations and ritual, Erin Sweeny’s process is centered around themes of movement and distillation. Chance, repetition, and the grid are all players in a process defined as both scrappy and reverent. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and has been an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow, ACRE and The Wassaic Project. Her writing has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail and as a regular contributor for Art21 Magazine; her 2017 artist book, Protanopia, was published by Small Editions. Sweeny is also the creator of Shelter, a podcast centered around conversations about home, place and refuge. She lives in Philadelphia.

Captions
Erin Sweeny, Desmarais I, digital c-print, 20” x 30″, 2020, $600
Erin Sweeny, Desmarais II, digital c-print, 20” x 30″, 2020, $600
Erin Sweeny, Desmarais III, digital c-print, 20” x 30″, 2020, $600
Erin Sweeny, Mama snorkeling, digital c-print, 4” x 6″, 2003/2020, NFS
Erin Sweeny, Desmarais Beats Sketch, digital audio recording, 2020, NFS

Statement
In this series, I worked through the grief of my mother dying. I felt like I was the last existing proof that she was ever alive, and I was tormented by my own resemblance to her. I longed for her, while also being terrified to become her, and thereby to become the tragic feminist trope of the willful and crazy woman, who must perish in order to finally find rest. I wanted to create another story for her, and to find ways to carry her with me that were not riddled with patriarchal violence.

Bio
Rakel Stammer is an interdisciplinary artist and printmaker from Denmark. Her work explores the intersections of trauma, liberation, violence, and care, using the narrative of her lived experiences and her background as a feminist activist and scholar. Over the past few years her artistic practice has shifted from visual art, to include performance, video, sound and installation. She has exhibited in Mexico, Russia, USA, and across Europe. In 2019, she attended a residency at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and is currently attending a five month residency at the well renowned art and design school Krabbesholm Højskole, in Skive, Denmark.

Captions
Rakel Stammer + M Aimé Dabbadie, The Mother Collages, Photocollage printed on paper, 11” x 14”, date, $80
Rakel Stammer + M Aimé Dabbadie, The Mother Collages, Photocollage printed on paper, 11” x 14”, date, $80
Rakel Stammer, The Mother Drawings, Ink on Paper, 18” x 25”, date, $220
Rakel Stammer, The Mother Drawings, Ink on Paper, 18” x 25”, date, $220
Rakel Stammer, The Mother Drawings, Ink on Paper, 18” x 25”, date, $220

Statement
Although I very much wanted to start a family, I worried that my identity as an artist would be overwhelmed by the experience of motherhood. In the throes of pregnancy and raising young children, I was able to sustain my creative life by making work about parenting. My drawings often recast creatures from myths and folklore into new superheroes for the modern family. In Man Nurses Puppies, I reimagine the myth of Remus and Romulus as a father nursing his litter. Similarly, the “reclining nude” of Harvesters suggests the strangely calm/explosive give-fest that is motherhood. Both these works intend to complicate notions of parenthood by depicting absurd versions of idealized domestic roles.

Bio

Jackie Skrzynski (skrin-ski) grew up one of eight children in a family that moved from western New York to North Carolina when she was a young girl. She believes her southern childhood and Polish Catholic roots contributed to her somewhat gothic sensibility. She earned her undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill, including a pivotal year in Spain, and her MA and MFA from the University at Albany, NY. Her artwork has been widely exhibited at universities and galleries, including mostly recently at Mount Saint Mary’s College, The Seligmann Center, Art Spaces @Krasdale, and Morehead State University.  In 2018, she was awarded a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and is a 4-time recipient of the Orange County Individual Artist award.
      Beyond her studio practice, Skrzynski is interested in bringing art to the community in creative ways. She is the founder of PUG Projects, which creates temporary art exhibits in transitional, economically diverse spaces. She also created the yearlong outdoor collaborative piece Silent Walks on the Half Moon documented in a blog by the same name, which has been exhibited at the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz.
      Art Historian Carol Duncan wrote that “Jackie’s imagery avoids completely the cute, the cuddly, and the sentimental,…If she breaches the boundary between the human and the animal, she does so to challenge its veracity and retrieve something of value on the other side.”

Captions
Jackie Skrzynski, Harvesters, charcoal and colored pencil, 70″x 50″, 2004, $900
Jackie Skrzynski, Man Nurses Puppies, pencil and colored pencil, 11″ x 8.5″, 1999, $400
Jackie Skrzynski, Boy Napping with Bears charcoal and colored pencil, 50” x 60”, 2006, $1000

Statement
‘Tethered to a Ghost’: I began ‘Tethered to a Ghost’ during the early weeks of my pregnancy with my daughter. Knowing that 80 percent of miscarriages occur during those critical weeks of the first trimester, I had a lot of fear that I would lose the baby.

Embedded under the surface of the paint in this piece are materials that held a kind of ‘maternal voodoo’ for me: scraps of a pair of my mother’s jeans, a metaphorical self-reminder of my good childbearing genes. A piece of rope that I imagined as a tether between me and the tiny being growing inside me. Gauze and rags, materials I associated with childbirth throughout the ages, when medical science was more primitive and women still managed to give birth.

Upon the surface of this textured tapestry of materials, I painted some of the visions that haunted me, as if to purge them from my psyche: spontaneous spots of blood, the tiny kidney bean-shaped fetus we saw on the ultrasound, the black void-like space that would be left if the baby were lost.

As the painting evolved, it became both a place to contain some of my deepest fears from those early days of pregnancy (the horror of inadvertently causing death, of living with a death inside me) but also a talisman for protection of this new life and an emblem of my own strength and resilience.

‘Tarpit’: In making this painting I thought a lot about the first sleepless weeks of being a new parent, when everything felt stuck in slow motion. Day and night became indistinguishable from each other, one cycle of diaper changes and feedings bleeding into another. I remembered the La Brea tarpits in L.A., which I had visited as a child, and how slick and weighty they felt with all that buried history. I wanted to make a painting where I could bury my own history from those early weeks of motherhood. Floating under the black, slippery surface of this painting are scraps from that era—cloth diapers, a crocheted afghan, the arm of a onesie, twisted breast-pump cords. While the materials and shapes present point toward a contemporary experience of child-rearing, the oily, black morass that these materials float in alludes to life’s mysterious origins.

Bio
Ahna Serendren was born in La Jolla, California. She holds an MFA in combined media from Hunter College in New York City, a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in English literature and creative writing from UCLA. Ahna’s work has been exhibited at Maldonado Projects in New York City, Idio Gallery and Nancy Daum in Brooklyn, and Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles, California. Her work resides in private collections in New York, Los Angeles, and London.

Captions
Ahna Serendren, Tarpit, acrylic, oil and mixed media on canvas, 36” X 48”, 2018, $2000
Ahna Serendren, Tethered to a Ghost, acrylic, oil and mixed media on canvas, with paper pulp frame, 62.5” x 72.5”, 2018, NFS

Statement
I am a person who sets ambitious goals, and normally achieves them. When my wife and I decided to get pregnant, I thought of it as a goal like any other. ‘Dissection’ is a series of weavings that reflect on what has happened to my body and my mind as a result of that goal.

These weavings are hung in a straight line to visually dissect the gallery in two. This line creates a divide to represent how we either rise or fall. The space between any beginning and end seems to suspend in time, frozen in an eternity of discomfort. Many weavings are dipped in resin to capture those frozen moments and to show contrast between the softness of the natural fiber and the stiff and shiny surface of the resin. Large sections of yarn are removed in both warp and weft, which makes the finished weavings appear to be pulled apart, unfinished or broken. The palette references the female body: skin, blood, and hair. Some weavings are left exposed, silky and lush, and hold moments of beauty and love.

These pieces express degrees of conflict, challenge, and hope that are before me, as I await motherhood.

Bio
Jessica Pinsky grew up in Akron, Ohio and moved to Cleveland in 2011, after receiving a BFA from New York University in 2006, and an MFA from Boston University in 2009. Her artwork bridges painting, weaving and sculpture: she is represented by Hedge Gallery in Cleveland, OH. In 2012, she worked closely with Cleveland Institute of Art to found Praxis Fiber Workshop, a community textile organization where CIA students can receive credited classes. She is currently the Executive Director at Praxis and teaches adjunct classes in Printmaking at Cleveland Institute of Art.
www.jessicapinsky.com

Captions
1.Jessica Pinsky, Dissection Series No. 6, handwoven, dyed and dipped in resin, approx 12” x 12”, 2018

Statement
Breast pump parts, diapers and wipes are just a few of the supplies that came with parenthood – and upon their arrival, an expanded sense of domesticity. With the careful use of light, palette, composition and collage, objects are photographed in a way that suggest new meaning.

Bio
Steven Paneccasio (b. 1982, CT United States) is a color photographer who lives in Beacon, New York. He has worked as an adjunct photography professor at SUNY Purchase as well as Bowling Green State University and also worked as a Digital Imaging Specialist for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He received an MFA in photography from MassArt and a BFA in photography from SUNY Purchase. His works range from vast landscapes of the American West to still lifes from his domestic space. With the use of a carefully selected (often minimal) color palette paired with precise description, his images often ask the viewer for a close and careful read.

Captions
Steven Paneccasio, Untitled (Breast Pump Valve), 2020, Archival Inkjet Print, 20 x 13 ¼ inches. Edition of 5, $1400.
Steven Paneccasio, Untitled (Peppers and Kale), 2020, Archival Inkjet Print, 20 x 13 ¼ inches. Edition of 5, $1400.
Steven Paneccasio, Untitled (Blue Cap), 2020, Archival Inkjet Print, 20 x 13 ¼ inches. Edition of 5, $1400.

Statement
So thankful to have had this opportunity to collaborate with Kacie Lyn Martinez. I was so inspired by her poignant ”Love Letters to The Garden” at our Community Garden in New York City last summer – it’s been great to revisit it together in this short film.

Bio
Laurie Olinder is a multi-media designer, painter, photographer. She is a founding member of New York’s Ridge Theater and has been recognized with an OBIE Award, a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award and an Eliot Norton Award for Outstanding Design in the Theater and a NYFA fellowship.
Ms. Olinder has designed video projections for numerous contemporary composers and performers, including John Adams, The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, The Brooklyn Philharmonic, Gavin Bryars, Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, Henryk Gorecki, The Kronos Quartet, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. Her work has been shown at noted performance venues such as ART, BAM, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and MASS MoCA. She is also a painter and textile designer most recently exhibited her work at The Phatory in New York.

Captions
Kacie Lyn Martinez & Laurie Olinder, Dearest Mother Nature, video, 3:35min, 2020

Statement
Kacie Lyn Martinez (USA) on a journey to understand how individuals and communities heal, dream, and self actualize. She does this as a participatory fiber artist / tejedora, facilitator, and independent designer for organizational systems and high impact programs. She does this as someone who’s mixed race, mixed class, and queer, as someone who comes from a line of healers, weavers, violence survivors, and traveling peoples.
For over a decade and across five countries, Martinez’s participatory practice includes designing installations, programs, and experiences that collaboratively reimagine inclusive, safe, engaged communities. She believes that too often we exist in dehumanizing systems and uphold short-term goals at the expense of long-term, transformative wins. As a weaver and program designer, Kacie Lyn applies the human-centered strategy tools from her tech background alongside weaving and unconventional facilitation media. With these, she co-creates spaces, tools, languages, and processes for collective healing and dream new possibilities, such as letter exchanges, civic innovation challenges, sonic meditations, 50ft walls of woven hopes, the redesign of a startup’s sales pipeline, design summits. A majority of Martinez’s work is in non-traditional art spaces (companies, non-profits, public spaces, gardens, and support groups) and involves a shared authorship with participants of the process and outcome, where her role is often holding space for vulnerability.
In Kacie Lyn Martinez’s personal conceptual practice, she works with process-heavy medía to uncover the layered map of her psyche. A key function of her work is using the traditional weaving warp:weft relationship to engage with the modernist fetish of rigid enclosures (grids, stages, and categories) to make sense of the world. While bending, breaking, or strictly abiding by grid structures, Kacie Lyn incorporates organic shapes and botanic themes to enable and work through vulnerability, conflict, movement, contradictions, psychic pains — all essential processes for personal and collective cathartic healing. Her body of work, which spans fiber, poetry, painting, printmaking, digital, and drawing, collectively creates a highly personal visual vocabulary and a discursive identity landscape of her underworld.

Bio
Kacie Lyn Martinez is a weaver of words, ideas, fibers, and values. As a participatory fiber artist / tejedora, facilitator, and organizational designer, she is on a journey to understand how individuals and communities heal, dream, and self-actualize. For over a decade and across five countries, she has built installations and programs that reimagine inclusive, safe, engaged communities. In addition, her personal practice spans fiber, poetry, painting, and printmaking to create a highly personal visual vocabulary and a discursive identity landscape of her underworld. With advanced degrees from Wellesley College and the London School of Economics, she uses her diverse background in intergenerational healing, systems thinking, civic-focused technology, and community organizing to collaboratively envision and weave together new possibilities.
Captions
Kacie Lyn Martinez, tears and mold, wool, cotton, linen, pipe, 25 x 27 x 2”, 2018
Kacie Lyn Martinez, tears and mold (detail), wool, cotton, linen, pipe, 25 x 27 x 2”, 2018
Kacie Lyn Martinez, tears and mold (detail), wool, cotton, linen, pipe, 25 x 27 x 2”, 2018

In tears and mold (2018), fiber artist Kacie Lyn Martinez seeks to make sense of the unexpected loss of her mother. She juxtaposed the stiff structure of a metal pipe with the heaviness of weeping yarn. By drawing from organic elements, her fiber-based language evokes the pain of an unbalanced body, heart, and mind during traumatic grief.

Grace Wilentz & Kacie Lyn Martinez, The Limit of Light, poetry & photograph
of site-specific tapestry, 1:53min
Grace Wilentz & Kacie Lyn Martinez, The Limit of Light, poetry & photograph
of site-specific tapestry, 1:53min

The Limit of Light is a collaboration between weaver Kacie Lyn Martinez and poet Grace Wilentz. The project is guided by the seeking out, and ultimate creating of a landscape where one can begin to grieve. The photograph is of side-by-side tapestries in the Anza Borrego Desert. The tapestries reinterpret fiber-based canyons found in the American Southwest, a place that unites both artists who separately found refuge in the Southwest after the death of their mothers. The photograph is audibly layered with a series of short poems that tap into the richness of the language of this geography, while also reproducing its minimalism. The work honors a landscape which, at a glance is barren and even reminiscent of another planet, but where so much is alive, thriving and able to be held.

6. Kacie Lyn Martinez & Laurie Olinder, Dearest Mother Nature, video 3:35min, 2020
7. Kacie Lyn Martinez & Laurie Olinder, Dearest Mother Nature, video still, 3:35min, 2020

Laurie Olinder and Kacie Lyn Martinez’s collaborative piece Dearest Mother Nature is a multimedia love letter to the natural world. The piece is an extension from Martinez’s participatory installation Garden Love Letters (2019), where members of a community garden in the East Village used natural fibers and garden clippings to weave together hundreds of thank you letters addressed to the garden, ultimately forming a standing altar. In this reimagination, Olinder and Martinez incorporate footage of the original altar to express gratitude of the broader concept of Mother Nature. Using COVID-19 as a moment of reflection, this new letter read by Martinez draws from dozens of original notes in Garden Love Letters to create a new letter about hope, humility, and transformation.

Bio
Sahar Muradi is a writer, performer, and educator based in New York City. She is author of the poetry collection [ G A T E S ] and co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature. She has published most recently in KAF Journal and Brooklyn Rail. Sahar is a recipient of the Stacy Doris Memorial Poetry Prize, a Kundiman Poetry Fellow, and a co-founder of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association. She has an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, an MPA in international development from NYU, and a BA in creative writing from Hampshire College. Sahar manages the poetry and education programs at City Lore and dearly believes in the bottom of the rice pot. http://saharmuradi.com/

Captions
Sahar Muradi, screenprinted broadside of poem for Soma, 12” x 18”, 2019, price

Statement
When my mother, Mable Ball Mihaly, who had Alzheimer’s, died, my brother & I donated many of her possessions, sold some, tossed others & stashed those that were hardest to part with in the attic. That echoey top floor had also become the repository for the belongings & mementos that I’d clung to from my own past lives.

Recently, I decided to take stock of what’s upstairs, hoping to record & memorialize the stored photos & objects before bidding some a final farewell. I also wanted to use them as a springboard to create work that embodies the spirit of the people, places & times they conjure, as well as the influence all have had on me. Working on The Attic has been at times funny, often joyful, frequently painful, but always powerful.

Bio
A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Julie Mihaly attended Vassar College before earning a BFA & MFA in photography from The San Francisco Art Institute. After teaching photography for more than a decade at schools such as NYC’s School of Visual Arts & Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University, Mihaly contributed her talents as a photo director, editor & researcher to magazines such as “Vanity Fair,”“Entertainment Weekly” & “Garden Design,” & also wrote for “Martha Stewart Living,” “Budget Living” & “Organic Style” before returning to the full-time pursuit of her photography. Mihaly has exhibited her work in the U.S., Canada & Britain, winning inclusion in a number of juried exhibitions. She is one of four 2018 recipients of a Working Artists Organization grant, & won first prize for 2 excerpts from “The Attic” in the SoHo Photo Gallery 2019 Open Competition.” Seven books of Mihaly’s work have been published, “Julie Mihaly: She Began to Realize,” (funded in part by a National Endowment for the Arts grant), “The View From Here,” “Notes in Passing,” “Radius: One Year Five Miles,” “The Attic,” “Water’s Edge” & “Washed Up.” Mihaly currently lives & works in the Hudson River Valley.

Website: http://www.juliemihaly.com/Photo.html

Captions
Julie Mihaly, The Attic: Lies, digital photograph and text/audio, 32” x 20”, 2019, $800
Julie Mihaly, The Attic: PawPaw, digital photograph and text, 32” x 20”, 2019, $800

Statement

Through drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, and animation, I hope to compress time in order to squish out pottery shards, striations on kerf walls, circuitry, and breath so hot it steams your sunnies.

For (s)mother, I am thinking of motherhood in unconventional ways because the parent who was most involved with me in early childhood was my father, who worked at home, while my mother worked outside the home. This was the early 60’s, however, and this was no feminist arrangement.

Bio
Maria Driscoll McMahon is an interdisciplinary installation artist from upstate New York where she teaches drawing and painting on the university level. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and has been awarded several grants for community projects and personal work. In addition to group exhibitions, she most recently had a solo show at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ, in February 2020, and has been awarded a residency at Uillinn West Cork Art Center in Skibbereen, Ireland, for August 2020. Using the compression of time as device, Driscoll McMahon’s work has explored rural and urban tensions, considered the psycho-socio-political implications of mass DNA testing, investigated the reach/overreach of science, and challenged gender constructs and heteronormative white male supremacy. 


Captions
Maria Driscoll McMahon, Pink Belt Pink Smoke, graphite on paper, 48” x 72”, 2012
Maria Driscoll McMahon,Cleaner Fish, graphite on paper, 11” x 14”, 2015

Statement
After living with selective mutism through my youth, my work breaks the silence and tells the secret stories hidden away in order to survive.

Bio
Brooklyn based writer and composer Char McCutcheon has been telling stories since the 80’s. Originally a songwriter, Char uses ink, canvas, and words to explore complex, tender and often untold tales.

Captions
Char McCutcheon, A Public Memorial for Della McCutcheon: Part I, text printed on canvas, 24”x18”, March 2020, $74
Char McCutcheon, A Public Memorial for Della McCutcheon: Part II, text printed on canvas, 24”x18”, March 2020, $74

Statement
Since becoming a mother in 2018, my work has taken on a new distinct direction. I have returned to primarily sculpting the figure, but with my child (and new self) as primary muse. This work seeks to mine the incredibly rich and complex territory of all the changes, to both the physical and psychological body, inherent in the process of becoming a mother.

Bio
Ashley Lyon (b. 1983) uses clay material to create objects and images to construct a dialectical relationship between space, viewer, image, and form. Instead of using life-casts, she meticulously hand builds all the components of her work, addressing levels of realism in an attempt to transcend traditional figuration. In 2011, she received an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in 2006 a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Washington, Seattle. Lyon’s work is shown nationally and internationally. She has been awarded residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the European Ceramic WorkCentre, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She received an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant in 2011 and 2014, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at New Jersey City University, as well as co-founder and co-director of the Belfry, an artist-run exhibition venue in a repurposed Methodist church located in Hornell, NY. She currently resides and works in Newburgh, NY.

Captions
Ashley Lyon, MOTHER, Ceramic Sculpture, 24 x 24 x 70, 2020, $8000
Ashley Lyon, MOTHER, Ceramic Sculpture, 24 x 24 x 70, 2020, $8000
Ashley Lyon, MOTHER (detail), Ceramic Sculpture, 24 x 24 x 70, 2020, $8000
Ashley Lyon, MOTHER (detail), Ceramic Sculpture, 24 x 24 x 70, 2020, $8000
Ashley Lyon, MOTHER (detail), Ceramic Sculpture, 24 x 24 x 70, 2020, $8000

Statement
The growing human skeleton inside sucks from his mother’s bones becoming the stuff of the next generations. We were stardust molecules made in the first second after the Big Bang and recycled through stones and gasses and plants and animals. Seasons take their toll and we turn into troll rocks remembrances of ancient mountain chains 2 billion years and the huge and powerful mountains turn into broken bones and dust. We are hollowed out. Our kids play on the rocks though.

Bio
Liz Luisada’s watercolors feature numinous images that range from demonic goddesses to color-wheel webs. Her new works on paper examine a spectrum of feminist and spiritual themes, from motherhood to nature to the admiration of color as pure form. Luisada has been exhibiting her work in the United States since 2005. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and is in the public collection of the Cleveland Clinic. She is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York. She holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and lives and works in rural Pennsylvania.
Website: lizluisada.net

Captions
Liz Luisada, Untitled, watercolor on Khadi paper, 8” x 5.5”, 2020, price
Liz Luisada, Untitled, watercolor on Khadi paper, 8” x 5.5”, 2020, price

Statement
The American painter George Bellows (1883-1925) said that the ideal artist “knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything and retains his experience in the spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust…the ideal artist is Superman. He uses every possible power, spirit, emotion — conscious or unconscious — to arrive at his ends.”

Bio
I am a New York traditional artist based out of Westchester County. My primary focus is anatomical studies with contemporary color theory. My work for over 20 years has been a range of murals, still life, landscape, charcoal, pencil drawing, and sculpture with a foundation in realism. Over the years, I’ve sold throughout the country.

Graduating from New York Academy of Art, I’ve had the opportunity to auction my work at Sotheby’s, ‘Take Home a Nude’ benefit auction for NYAA, and ‘Paint the Town Red’ Group show in New York City. I am primarily known for my mural work in New York City.

My mural works are based on historical background and research of each unique project. Follow me on Instagram @peter_leeds_studio

Captions
Peter Leeds, Daddy and River Bear, pencil on paper, 3’ x 4.5’, NFS
Peter Leeds, Baby River Dreaming, oil on wood, 5” x 17”, $960

Statement
I made these works while I was pregnant and more physically aware of how much our bodies define and limit our interaction with the world. My interest in vessels certainly comes in part from their relationship to the body and for how much they withhold from the viewer.

Part of my interest in clay is its ability to simultaneously hold its past and present states. Clay holds a memory of the pliable smooth putty it was in its hardened final state, which pushes forth a rich tactile experience of the material world.

Bio
Kate Elliot is a native New Yorker currently living in Queens, NY. She received her MFA in sculpture from Hunter College in 2015. She has participated in residencies and fellowships at Cooper Union, Triangle Artist Workshop, I-M-A-R, SUNY Purchase and the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Ms. Elliot has shown at The Old Hairdressers (Glasgow), TSA (Brooklyn), Storefront Ten Eyck (Bushwick, Brooklyn), Temporary Agency (Ridgewood, Queens), and Accola Griefen Gallery (Chelsea, Manhattan).

Captions
Kate Starbuck Elliot, untitled (oh, baby), quilted fabric, stoneware, 72” x 60” x 10”, 2017, price $5,000
Kate Starbuck Elliot, untitled (held), porcelain, silk, 12″ x 6″ x 6″, 2017, price $3200
Kate Starbuck Elliot, untitled (held), porcelain, silk, 12″ x 6″ x 6″, 2017, price $3200

Statement
My artistic practice began as a remedy for my oft-crippling anxieties regarding the perpetuity of time and my deficient memory. As my process evolved, so too did the illness: my anxieties found camaraderie in those of the Anthropocene. Viewed together, the work chronicles an intimate transition from experience to relationship. Separately, they are multi-media versions of candid photographs, visualizing exchanges of hesitation, play, tension, and confusion, and communion.

As a means to focus myself on a present experience, I turn to the living world. Having been raised by avid campers, this is the method I know best. Much like choosing a campsite, I stake out an anonymous outdoor location. There, I secure a frame stretched with acetate and, using fabric, paint, vinyl, marker, and other materials, I engage the composition through the frame, making marks both on the acetate and in the environment. Because I am collaborating with the physical and phenomenological, my participation in this process is dependent on space and time: place, presence, and person unite. For this reason, I must work quickly, but the process both consumes and grounds me. Once complete, I photograph through the acetate, creating a hybrid image that confuses spatial assumptions and conflates hierarchies. For each chosen location, I create several of these “integrated photographs.”

This process alleviates my internal anxieties, but they return upon completion; place and person have not detained time. However, through this triangulation, I am left with a fourth thing: relationship. In the studio work that follows, I court relationship using a multitude of media that hold varying degrees of temporality. I collage material detritus from the integrated photographs, yielding pieces that isolate colors, shapes, marks, and textures extracted from the location by my own hand. Conversely, through graphite drawings of the integrated photographs, I meticulously infuse the environment’s patterns and forms into my muscle memory while leaving blank areas of the composition previously interrupted by my own marks. Each new material accesses an additional entry point into my understanding of the place-and-time-based experience. As artistic processes expand, boundaries between contributions dissolve: I could not say which trinkets inside the assemblage-like “Deconstructed Sites” are my projections onto the location or vice versa. By the time I move on to mixed media, installation, and sculpture, I have given myself full freedom within my memory of the experience. I invent vantage points and conversations with the location, and whether or not I have lived them is no longer a relevant question. Courtship leads to play, and play becomes imaginative recognition a la James Hillman: by animating the world, it returns to the soul.

This steady exchange between person and place blurs them into one, constant presence. Deep Ecology calls this process self realization, and it results in being inextricably intertwined with the phenomenal world. Thus, with each locational experience, I cultivate not only the fourth thing – relationship – but an ecological, continuous self. To my relief, the anxieties I release outward are distilled, but only to be equalized by affections and afflictions much larger than myself.

Bio
Leduc is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes photography, painting, drawing, collage, and installation. Collaborating with chosen locations, Leduc’s work addresses boundary conflation and resensitization of place in a world deprived of environmental empathy. Her work has recently been shown at Whitesbog Historic Village (NJ), Project 59 (Governors Island, NYC), RAW (Miami, FL), Ortega y Gasset Projects (NYC), and Wells College (Aurora, NY). She has attended residencies such as PLAYA, Tofte Lake Center, Vermont Studio Center, and White Pines and has received support from NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, Atlas Obscura, the Wells College Scholar-in-Residence Program, and Rutgers University. Recent publications include unpsychology, Artis Natura, A+E Collective, and 100days100women. Leduc received her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and BA from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently teaches at William Paterson, Ramapo College, and Rutgers University. She is creator and co-founder of GROUNDWORK, an interdisciplinary creative retreat.

www.ritaleduc.com
www.groundworkretreat.com

Captions

1. Rita Leduc, Rocks on an Arguably Solitary Journey (II), mixed media, approx. 90” x 36” x 20″, 2020
2. Rita Leduc, Rocks on an Arguably Solitary Journey (II), (installation shot at Bethany, mixed media, approx. 90” x 36” x 20″, 2020
3. Rita Leduc, Rocks on an Arguably Solitary Journey (I), mixed media, approx. 48” x 40” x 24″, 2020
4. Rita Leduc, Robert (installation shot at Bethany), ceramic, fabric, foam, wood, paper, acrylic, 25” x 31”, 2019
5. Rita Leduc, Deconstructed Site: Brooklyn and Playa (installation shot at Bethany), mixed media, 2” x 6.5” x 8” box, 6” x 4” card, 2017
6. Rita Leduc, Deconstructed Site: 52nd St/Brooklyn (card), mixed media, 2” x 6.5” x 8” box, 6” x 4” card, 2017
7. Rita Leduc, Deconstructed Site: 52nd St/Brooklyn (box), mixed media, 2” x 6.5” x 8” box, 6” x 4” card, 2017
8. Rita Leduc, Deconstructed Site: Playa (card), mixed media, 2” x 6.5” x 8” box, 6” x 4” card, 2017
9. Rita Leduc, Deconstructed Site: Playa (box), mixed media, 2” x 6.5” x 8” box, 6” x 4” card, 2017

Statement
My paintings are abstractions of emotions and states of awareness. Through the act of making, I am able to give physicality to my inner experiences. The oil, acrylic, watercolor and gouache paintings loosely reference the cosmos and the natural world – forests, water, sky, mountains – and are made intuitively by adding and taking away marks until the symbols emerge. The watercolor and gouache paintings on paper are occupied by humorous and tragic figures. They are grounded in dream like narratives recanted from childhood, Russian animations and fairy tales. They are ghosts and my guides. These particular works were made after Frida was born and have something to do with how I experienced becoming a mother.

Bio
Maria Kondratiev was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and works in Queens, New York. Maria Received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the School of Art and Design, S.U.N.Y. Purchase College, and her MA in Art Therapy from New York University.

Captions
Maria Kondratiev, Alone, watercolor on paper, 8” x 12”, 2018, price
Maria Kondratiev, Grateful, watercolor on paper, 8” x 10”, 2020
Maria Kondratiev, Late at night, watercolor gouache on paper, 6.5” x 10”, 2018
Maria Kondratiev, Untitled (alien breasts), gouache watercolor on paper, 8” x 10”,2018
Maria Kondratiev, Mother Ghosts, watercolor on paper, 8” x 10”, 2020
Maria Kondratiev, Untitled (all I want to do is close me eyes), gouache watercolor on paper, 6.5” x 10”, 2018

Statement
Relational Paradigms is a long-term participatory video project documenting some of the intimate gestures produced through participatory social interactions. My intention is to both draw the viewer into the personal scale of gestural moments between people, and to work with time sequencing to build non-narrative gestural meanings.

Relational Paradigms #5: Passing the Baby documents a group of people who have joined a continuous, repetitive, looping task of keeping a baby in motion from person to person for an extended period of time. The sequence tracks the charged moments of engagement, intimacy, discomfort, insecurity, joy, longing, fear, precariousness, comfort, disengagement and re-engagement that flicker throughout, for both the baby and each passer. These are everyday gestures of trust, and potential violation of trust.

Passing The Baby is intended to resonate with current moments large and small, when children change hands. Such moments include the joyful transit among loved ones, away from the mother and back again. There is also the paradigm of leaving one family to be taken into another, cutting across intimate personal/social/cultural bonds, and the re-weaving of those bonds differently, as in adoption. And there is the paradigm of total rupture, the passing of the baby into uncertainty.

Techniques of time-sequencing in the project are reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s Motion Studies, which focused on mundane everyday actions in a scientific methodology that purported to be socially value-free. In Relational Paradigms sequences, I hope to point to social values inherent in these gestures, and bring them to the surface as objects of contemplation. Link to project: https://sdrury19.wixsite.com/relationalparadigms

Bio
Sarah Drury is a media artist working in video, digital/interactive performance and installation, and various collaborative methodologies. Her video pieces, interactive media installations, collaborative social practice performance projects and interactive media design for theater have been exhibited and presented internationally for the past twenty years, including at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, at the SIGGRAPH conference, The Kitchen, and the International Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA). She is on the faculty of the Temple University Film & Media Arts Department, teaching media installation and interactive media art forms. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Deborah Sherman and their 12 year old Solomon.

Captions
Sarah Drury, Relational Paradigms #5: Passing the Baby, two-screen video installation, dimensions variable, 2019
Link: https://vimeo.com/388707426

Statement
Nap Book: I began this book of drawings in March of 2019, when my baby was 5 months old and our family had traveled to the Philippines for work. When we arrived there we learned that what we were told was a minor outbreak of Measles was in fact an epidemic with over 20,000 cases and hospital wards full to the brim. While we waited to figure out an exit strategy, I had to quarantine with our daughter in our small apartment as she was too young to be vaccinated. Faced with the fact that I could not take her outside with temperatures in the 100’s, or anywhere inside where there were other people, I needed some activity to make me feel like I was doing something even on a small scale. I was able to purchase this sketchbook and an ink pen in a local stationary store and every time she slept, I made repetitive drawings until she woke up. This book is the product of my total free time during the month and a half I spent quarantined with my daughter in Manila last year, it ends before the book is done, marking our return to the US.

Bio
Alta Buden is a New York based visual artist concerned with our relationship to the environment. Her work draws on her studies of evolutionary biology, her childhood experience of new age mysticism and the time she spent working with scientists at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, IL.
Her practice is rooted in the sites where she works, often outdoors, using water, rocks and other natural forms as a visual source. Her process involves “recording” the environment, using various mediums to capture the data, history and memories present in the ever-shifting and evolving landscape. Her pieces become vessels of sorts, mediating the human experience of nature while holding the biological, and geological forms from their origins.
Her work has been exhibited in New York and Chicago and has been shown at the Smart Museum of Art (IL) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (IL). She received a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship in 2013. She has degrees in Visual Arts, and History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Chicago. She holds an MFA from Hunter College (2017) with a certificate in curatorial studies and was a member of Regina Rex an artist run gallery on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, NY.

Captions
Alta Buden, Nap Book, 6” x 8”, 2019, price upon request

Statement
These videos are created with my iPhone, quickly rigged to anything available that could be used as an impromptu tripod (car roofs, trash bins, my boyfriend, etc). They feature my grandmother, mother, sister, and I and were first conceived as a way to make my mom smile. There is a fun and wild spark of pure imagination that can catch fire when the four of us are together. These videos are a tiny way to capture this fleeting moment of connection and the unique energy I feel with the women in my family. It’s hard to get everyone in sync before someone gets moody, I only get a couple of takes at the most before the energy passes. These videos are our moving family portraits.

Bio
Whitney Browne is an experimental and commercial photographer whose work explores themes of movement and gesture as reflections of mental states. In addition to working with individual artists and companies, Browne has been an educator for The School at Jacob’s Pillow since 2012. Recently she was awarded her first solo show for Summer 2021 at the Hercegovina Museum in Trebinje, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. Browne’s work invites us to join the conversation she is having with her subjects. Her philosophy, “let’s meet at the lens” is an exploration in the connection that challenges her subjects to be active in the/her creative process. She has spent the last decade developing her own experimental movement photography methods, working to build a visual language between photography and performance. Best known for her involvement in the dance community, she currently works from and manages Caravaglia Studios in New York City. Browne received a BA and BFA from Hunter College in Social Anthropology and Fine Art Photography.

Captions
GGG (Generational Girl Group)
Acts of inspiration and choreography for the camera by 3 generations of women.
Starring: Molly DeFranco, Diane DeFranco Browne, Ashley Browne, and Whitney Browne
Concept by Whitney Browne

Reunited (2017, 19s, digital video, silent)
I’ve Got Your Back (2017, 42s, digital video, silent)
California Palms (2017, 18s, digital video, silent)
Crossover (2017, 23s, digital video, silent)
Birds of a Feather (2018, 19s, digital video, silent)

Whitney Browne, Reunited, digital video, silent, 19s, 2017
Whitney Browne, I’ve Got Your Back, digital video, silent, 42s, 2017

Statement
Brody’s focus has long been fertility and feminism: Earth mother, tree of life, fertility goddess, and slender forms barely sexed. After witnessing her granddaughter’s birth the work changed subtly. Now dark clay and white cement combine showcasing the contrast of the color, texture, and scale. Color sneaks in.

Recently I fell down the stairs and hit my head. Motherhood had turned again. No longer the caretaker but the cared for. The arc of motherhood is long and many staged. Overwhelming, erasing, soul fulfilling and soul destroying, all encompassing. Turn and change until Mother needs to be managed. But Mother still creates about her life.

Bio
Jo-Ann Brody mixes her media—clay, cement, and now, paper mâché— all tactile media to create new constructs, grouping individual pieces into installations. She is viscerally involved with the hands-on application of materials. The art is tactile as well as visual.

Brody is a member of Ceres Gallery, Chelsea, NY, where she has had several one-person shows, most recently Off Balance in early 2019. Other shows include Gallery 66 in Cold Spring, NY; Studio A Gallery, Tarrytown, NY; Maxwell Fine Art, Peekskill, NY; Art at War, The Artist’s Voice, Aldo Castillo Gallery, Chicago IL; and has been included in several shows at The Arts Exchange, White Plains, NY, as well as a solo show/installation there. She participated in WORD at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art; The Hullabaloo Art Fair and the Affordable Art Fair. She shows at the Farm Project, Saunders Farm, Collaborative Concepts, Garrison, NY every year. Her books in clay were in The Third Biennial Women Book Artists Exhibition, Theresa Prator, Curator, Converse College, Spartanburg, SC; and in Women of the Book, a traveling exhibition, curated by Judith Hoffberg. Brody has also had a clay residency with shows in Nishijin, Kyoto, Japan.

This is her second showing at Bethany Arts Center.

Captions
Jo-Ann Brody, Torso/Outside In, fossilcrete™, stoneware, 31” x 14” x 11”, 2014, $1900

Statement
I feel very fortunate in these current circumstances that what inspires me most to create artwork is both the female form and my own domestic space. When I was pregnant, I became obsessed with creating vessels and drawings of containers that represented my ever changing body. Since having a baby, staying home on maternity leave, and now being forced to stay home again as a matter of public health, I’ve had a newfound appreciation for this space I am confined to. I love seeing how light affects the forms and patterns around my home, allowing me to make paintings and drawings that flatten space while acting as a snapshot of this bizarre, isolating time.

Bio
Living and working in Beacon, NY, Jessica Bottalico examines the narrative behind mundane objects that occupy domestic spaces. Bottalico completed her BFA at Maryland Institute College of Art and MFA in Painting at Rutgers University. Recent exhibitions include J Cacciola Gallery, Bronx Community College, Zurcher Gallery, Causey Contemporary, Proto Gallery, and Abrons Arts Center. She has completed Residencies with the Vermont Studio Center, and the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists in Lehon, France. She exhibits with Collective 131, an online collective of female artists. When she’s not painting, and making ceramics in her studio, she teaches art to high schoolers, and spends time with her baby girl.

www.jessicabottalico.com | jessica.bottalico@gmail.com

Captions
Jessica Bottalico, Shady Lady, Pen and Ink on paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2019, $250
Jessica Bottalico, Bedside, Pen, Ink and tissue paper residue on paper, 11 x 15 inches, 2020, $500
Jessica Bottalico, Crib Sheet, pen and ink on paper, 11 x 17 inches, 2020, $600
Jessica Bottalico, Untitled, pen and ink on paper, 12 x 18 inches, 2020, $600

Bio
Miřenka Čechová is a Czech director, choreographer, performer and scholar currently living and working in New York City. She is co-founder and house director of two internationally acclaimed theater companies: Spitfire Company and Tantehorse, and also works as an independent director. She began her career as a classical ballet dancer at the Dance Conservatory in Prague. Following, she continued her studies to earn two MA degrees in Theater and Nonverbal theater respectively. She was awarded a Ph.D in Physical Theater Direction from the Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where she has served as a professor of authorial theater since 2012. Ms. Cechova received a Fulbright scholarship in 2010/2011 to teach and research in the USA. She has combined her two disciplines of theater and dance to create her own physical and dance theater style.

www.mirenkacechova.com

Captions
Mirenka Cechova, My Body is a Totem, digital photograph, dimensions variable, December 2018, price upon request

Statement
Pumping was the only work of art I made in the first year after my daughter, Clara, was born. I let myself have a year of not worrying about making art after she was born, but this video was just begging to be shot. No one had ever shown me what pumping breast milk looked like. I remember, after the very first time I put the flange up to my nipple and turned on my pump, laughing with disbelief. I would show it to anyone who came over to visit, if they were curious. There was something so cartoonish and yet clinical in this process, so absurd and profound. It felt and looked awkward and yet I was surprised to find myself feeling strangely proud. This silly-looking, body-morphing practice was sustaining my daughter’s life and growth. Usually for my video shoots, I work with elaborate sets, fancy camera set-ups, lights, cast and crew. But for this work, my friend Ander took Clara to the park when she was about 7 months old, and I rigged a set up with a tiny Sony camera using a flimsy iPhone tripod and a series of plastic children’s toys (not as a statement on anything, but because all my equipment was in storage). I shot and edited the piece in just 5 hours, a true record for me. That was all the time I had, and, maybe by necessity, all the time I needed.

Bio
Irina Arnaut is a New York-based artist who uses performance and deliberately self-conscious humor to explore the contemporary experience of being a woman, both politically and personally. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals throughout the United States and internationally, including JDJ | The Ice House (Garrison, NY), Martos Gallery (New York, NY), Ms Barbers Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Queens Museum of Art (New York, NY), and the Living Art Museum (Reykjavík, Iceland). Arnaut was awarded the Yaddo Fellowship (2014) and the Millay Colony Fellowship (2014), and was an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Governors Island Residency in 2015. She received a B.S. from New York University (2006) and an M.F.A. from Bard College (2012).
www.irinaarnaut.com

Captions
Irina Arnaut, Pumping, digital video, (3:12), 2017
Irina Arnaut, Pumping, digital video still, (3:12), 2017
Irina Arnaut, Pumping, digital video still, (3:12), 2017
Irina Arnaut, Pumping, digital video still, (3:12), 2017