ARTISTS’ TALK | Elizabeth Keithline in Conversation with KEEP IT TOGETHER Artists
ARTISTS’ TALK | Elizabeth Keithline in Conversation with KEEP IT TOGETHER Artists
Saturday, September 19th, 2 pm
Elizabeth Keithline, solo exhibitor and juror of the companion exhibit KEEP IT TOGETHER, will participate in a conversation with exhibiting artists about their respective artistic practices and assemblage-based artwork on view that conveys a material and conceptual sense of solving and/or coping.
Exhibiting artists include Julia Barbour, Jeannine Bardo, Jenne Currie, Melanie Delgado, Tasha Depp, Karen E. Gersch, Lucy Handley, Jen Hicks, Chong Kang, Jeff & Wilson Keithline, Tracy Leavitt, Jignasha Leonardo, Jennifer McGregor, Eva Melas, Ann Morris, Jane Nelson, Suzanne Parker, Eileen Power, Amanda Russo Rubman, Anthony Scarzafava, Melissa Stern, Linda Stillman, Kimberly Truitt, Christina Varga, Ward Yoshimoto, Mimi Young, Leslie Zelamsky. (Presenters TBC.)
Please join the artists at Wallkill River Center for the Arts on Saturday, September 19th, starting at 2 PM for this lively conversation and walk through the galleries.
Juror’s Statement
Assemblage is art that is made by assembling disparate elements—often everyday objects—scavenged by the artist or bought specially. Tate Museum
In a way, one could say that we start our first puzzle when egg and sperm find each other and we end it when we die and our bodies fit back into the earth. In between, it seems we’re pretty much continually trying to solve issues both big and small:
We’re out of milk again. Who will go to the store?
My car died. Who can take me to the airport?
It’s hot out. How can we cool down the planet?
Our country is at war. How can we find peace?
Many pieces in this show express how artists are coping, as well as solving, these issues. Melissa Stern’s PINK LEG shows assembly and fit through absence. The person she creates is barely there, yet she is literally still kicking. Lucy Handley’s Prosperity puzzles together a shrine to wealth and comfort, while giving off a beautiful Miss-Havisham-dustiness.
Through small acts of repetition, Jeannine Bardo’s Dawn No. 45 seems to express a wish to stitch the days together into an orderly and cohesive whole. Similarly, Jennifer McGregor’s Thetford Interlude gathers and reuses wool as a sort of clock or chronicle of life. Melanie Delgado’s excellently titled Another Load Of Laundry evokes a calendar of another type, that of messy, ceaseless labor. Linda Stillman’s piece Maples On The Move continues her long history as an artist who pieces together an ever-changing natural world.
With this show, I hope to express an appreciation for how human beings continue to think their way forward despite challenges.
– Elizabeth Keithline
About the Juror and solo exhibitor, Elizabeth Keithline: Artist and arts administrator Elizabeth Keithline’s work focuses on human self-extension and human systems of all kinds – architecture, technology, cars, the modern built environment – particularly as those systems tie to the natural world.
She has shown widely in the United States including solo shows at ChaShaMa NYC, Governors Island NY, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Danforth Museum, the Newport Art Museum, Jane Street Art Center, the Waiting Room in New Orleans, Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, ArtPrize Grand Rapids, Real Art Ways in Hartford, and UMass Amherst. Her work has been well reviewed in the New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, the Boston Globe, Fiberarts, and others.
