Category: Art

We could all strive to be more like the letter X. It is a letter that has structural and sculptural integrity. With a wide stance and arms extended, it will not tip over. This letter is perfectly balanced and well proportioned; if it had a back you bet it wouldn’t ache. What would be an inspiring space to allow us to become more like the letter X? Our bodies are sculpture; we sculpt them along with objects. Could it also be an intersection of form and function, public and private? The Strength & Conditioning Creation Station is a participatory artwork and a functioning gym where folks can “design” their own workout in several different ways. There will be a mixture of creative minded people, personal trainers, and physical therapists to talk about the benefits of weightlifting with dumbbells and barbells and then to guide participants through the actions. However, the weights will not be standard, they will be made out of various upcycled materials crafted at the Red Hook Community Center Makerspace during open studio hours and special workshops throughout the summer and fall.

“The connection between wellbeing and art making is the driving factor for the majority of my work. At the beginning of July 2016 I moved back home to the Hudson Valley and later that month my brother died from a heroin overdose. Through grieving, working, and other life changes I have realized that in order to function I need to have the ability to create every moment of my life which is why I decided to farm and start the Makerspace. I aspire to create something enjoyable, recovery friendly, and free for the area that my brother and I spent the majority of our lives in.”

Daniel Totten is an artist and farmer who grew up and currently lives in the Hudson Valley. There he works on a beef and poultry farm and is the founder and program coordinator of the Red Hook Community Center Makerspace. He received his BFA from Alfred University in 2015.

The workshop, O+X = DO AND DON’T will focus will on integrating environmental Do’s and Don’ts and crafting with trash. Come join two environmental artists and share your ideas for making the world a better place. Drop in to the Kingston Artist Collective to contribute your own Do’s and Don’ts to Maxine’s cooperative sculpture and to create a reusable woven bag from old T-shirts with Arielle. Chat with the artists and get creative. Bring an old t-shirt if you can! (T-shirts will available for those who need one.)

Maxine is an environmental Taiwanese artist that focuses on the environment, communication and identity. Her most recent performance work titled Plady, a mummy made from plastics bags worn in Tops Friendly Markets, was documented in The Oracle and New Paltz Times.

Arielle Ponder has a deep respect and appreciation for our environment. Her work reflects the careful balance between humanity and nature. It is often inspired by the natural splendor and beauty of the region but also urges towards the spiritual and deeply emotional.

https://www.maxineleu.com/

https://www.arielleponder.org/

When we make a mistake, we ‘x’ it out. Writing, drawing, we have a need to physically destroy what has got awry. When you work with pen, there’s no going back, you need to start form scratch. What I’ve learned over the years in the process of making art is that crossing something out is not the answer- its best to use the mistake as much as possible and incorporate it into the work. The mistake can even bring about new inventions or creative ways to problem solve. ‘X’ is the mark that ultimately destroys. ‘X’ cancels forever. ‘X’ is what we are currently doing to our environment and sacred lands that surround us. We have an idea- a new project- a new development- a new dream- and we don’t let anything get in our way. This is causing eco-systems to be destroyed and with it- beautiful little souls. Cars race by on a stormy night and leave splattered bodies in its wake. Humankind has entered into an eco-system, perplexing it and leaving endangered predators who are no longer able to regulate the deer in the area. The deer graze and feast upon the wetlands, destroying the swamps and homes of salamanders, frogs and turtles. They’re left with lines of asphalt splitting their land. Water systems grow toxic due to fracking and the oil industry- as well as chemicals and factory waste. Amphibians are at the center of all this damage only to be seen as ‘slimy and gross’. Instead human kind chasing the ‘next big thing’ and speaking about their ‘American Dream’, the solution is right below us – taking care of the land we walk upon. This mural is about ‘X’tinction. About waking up, stopping our acts of cancelling nature, and growing together with the natural world. Tiger Salamanders are currently an endangered species within the Hudson Valley and are amazing, gorgeous creatures that need a little bit of love.

Annabelle Popa was born and raised in NYC and has a BFA in Illustration from the Parsons School of Design. She now lives in Kingston, NY. Her fantasy worlds and strange creatures are inspired by nature; they use allegory to communicate deeper meanings to viewers. She sees art as an exploration and adventure, and often it takes a life of its own by the end of the piece. She is merely a messenger who is able to peek into the vast unknown. Her art is based on folklore, fantasy, personal mythologies, and weird miss-moshed animal creatures. She tries to capture wild wonder, adventure, and the chaotic side of beauty. She makes an effort to paint atypical subjects in order to show another side of a story to get viewers thinking. http://annabellepopa.com

https://www.youtube.com/user/Fexazaur

In the spirit of O+, this collaborative project envisions wellness as more than just an individual concern. Embodying wellness means thinking about how communities work together with their ecosystems to create sustainable and just systems. The diverse and thriving communities of Mid-town and Rondout in Kingston are also home to antiquated urban infrastructure. This area contains a combined sewage overflow system that, under heavy rain or snow melt, releases untreated sewage directly into the Rondout Creek, impacting environmental and human health. Besides sewage, plastic trash, road salt and many pollutants find their way into the river, affecting the well-being of the Hudson, a drinking water source for 100,000 people. This project brings together several groups including Riverkeeper, the Art Department of SUNY New Paltz, Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency, Hudson River Watershed Alliance and the residents of Mid-town and Rondout. Before the start of the festival, the students of SUNY New Paltz will create a massive plastic ball from Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA). Festival participants will meet at Broadway and Foxhall Ave with Riverkeeper watershed educator Sebastian Pillitteri and SUNY New Paltz professor Matthew Friday. After a short discussion about Kingston’s ecology, history and infrastructure, participants will begin rolling the giant trash ball as they trace the route of the city’s largest remaining sewer overflow system. While tracing the path of the sewer, this work will also recognize the buried stream that traveled the same path and the City of Kingston’s current steps to separate stormwater and sewer water. We will stop at several spots to point out various aspects of Kingston’s infrastructure and entangled ecology. This project takes up the theme of health and art to creatively renvision the connections between urban infrastructure, ecology and everyday practice. Focusing on the “X” theme as both intersection and destination we are proposing a project that will help people visualize their relations to their watershed and plan for a better, healthier and more resilient future. For us, X marks the spot of Kingston’s invisibilized infrastructure, a cross between stormwater, sewage, natural ecology, and history.

Sebastian Pillitteri is the Community Science Coordinator at Riverkeeper.He will be partnering with Emily Vail, artist and director of the Hudson River Watershed Alliance. As well as Matthew Friday, Graduate Coordinator and Associate Professor of Critical Studies at SUNY New Paltz to realize this project.

This project is made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.

Four doors oriented as if they were four entrances to a square room. Weaving in and out of the door, creating an infinity symbol is a snake made of old wood siding and other detritus of a house that has collapsed. The wood becomes more decayed at the center of the symbol; the X. This section of the infinity symbol snake may contain many tiny porcelain bunnies.

Kerry Pharmer lives and works in High Falls NY. She studied art at The Maine College of Art and SUNY New Paltz. She has shown her work throughout the Hudson Valley region. Kerry initiated and curated the Newburgh Sculpture Project in 2004 to bring site specific art installations and visitors to the exceptionally beautiful but neglected areas of her home city. She is currently a part time art teacher and a graduate student at Pratt Institute.

http://www.kerrypharmer.com/

The Matter Digest is a living archive. It will be present at O+ to collect thoughts and ideas from the community, to be stored in The Matter Digest archive. Input into the archive will be chewed upon, digested, and then re-presented to the community by TMD founders, Havarah & Ernest. TMD will set up a tented space that people can enter and spend some time; outfitted with tables, chairs, fabric and pillows, the space will be inviting and comfortable.

They want  to start a conversation with people in the community about what matters to them. They want to hear from everyone and anyone. They want to hear about anything – from the dust bunnies in their living room to their financial concerns. This space will act as a point of intersection for the community. More specifically, we will be asking visitors to our booth to share recipes. Recipes of life – how do you wake up in the morning? Is there a recipe for perfectly clean socks? For a good conversation? A recipe for being a better neighbor? Recipes will be collected in our booth on the spot, either via written submission by the visitor or by transcription of their orated recipe. We will also offer visitors an addressed and stamped envelope so that they can send us their recipes at a later date. In the months following O+, these recipes will be compiled into a book, Recipes from Personhood, Vol. 2. The first volume of Recipes from Personhood was self-published in November of 2018 by The Matter Digest and is a collective volume of thoughts and practices. It includes recipes for consciousness (mind), sustenance (food), the mortal vessel (body), and more. The Matter Digest seeks to point out that OUR STORIES MAKE US STRONGER and that everyone has something to offer. Our booth at the O+ Festival will address the theme of ‘X’ in that ‘X’ is the marking of a point where we can all meet. It is the intersection of each and every one of us. The point at which our experiences unite us. X can also be a placeholder in the archive. Each person has a story to tell, a thought or recipe to share. The ‘X’ is that blank line in a sentence or paragraph to be filled in by anyone!

The Matter Digest is a living archive of thought, happenings, and experiences. Founded in the summer of 2018 by Ernest Goodmaw and Havarah Zawoluk, The Matter Digest exists in both no form and any form at all. It hopes to collect the “matter” of any person and preserve and present that matter to be chewed upon by any other person. The matter can then be digested, and thus brought into a collective consciousness. The Matter Digest is evolving daily. As it grows, it takes new forms, spills out into new realms of expression like water pushes through sand. To date, The Matter Digest has self-published three books: ‘Recipes from Personhood’, ‘Whatsa Home?’ and ‘STUFF’.

As an artist and facilitator, Ernest Goodmaw works to explore the connections and outcomes between the audience and the intention. They are fueled by questions, and ask them through documented and ephemeral performance, illustration, conversation, and experiments. How does it feel to be in the presence of something that asks a favor of you? How can we use what we have to interact with one another?

Havarah Zawoluk is a Kingston resident who has a passion for illustration and cartography. They have illustrated professionally for table top board games and various event promo materials. They have also organized many community events in the Hudson Valley, the most recent of which is a current on-going series of free workshops at Three Phase Center in Stone Ridge titled “ART/LIFE Automotive”.

www.thematterdigest.com

Beyond our stories & differences, where can we share healing and transpersonal experiences?  We seek to use the trauma we have been touched by as a gift, and to transform it to leave the world less hurting than we found it.  We dreamed this piece into being to illuminate thresholds, literally and in terms of curiosity, interconnection & transformation.  Like buddhist prayer flags setting the intentions into the wind – we work with light towards our aspirations.

“Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.” -John Wesley

www.cygnetsway.com

Joe create designs embedded with metaphors of science, DNA, technology botanicals, floral and indigenous designs rooted in cultural symbols like Celtic Knots, rose windows, islamic mosaics, african adinkra and many others. His work is about bringing all these symbols together.

His proposal for O+ year ten is a 10 pointed design.

Joe Mangrum’s sand paintings and multi-material installations explore issues of the urban grid, environmentalism and its effects on the collective psyche. Mangrum has developed a unique visual language tying together cultural patterns with those found in nature, science and technology to create living breathing forms that entangle their surroundings. He has created a series of over a thousand intricate sand paintings in public and private spaces as well as a body of permanent sand paintings on canvas and carved wood. His work is inspired by ancient traditions and synced with a rhythm of urban free-style animation, combined with bright “Pop Art” colors. His paintings are influenced by an abundant world of undersea creatures, botanicals and geometric forms of cross-cultural metaphors, representing a living mathematical amalgam. His technique with sand employs a graffiti like parallel of close to the ground sharp lines to a wide “spray” from higher up of diffused effects in alternating layers. Mangrum is based in New York City and has traveled with his work internationally. He kicked off 2018 with a commission by Prabal Gurung for the Spring Fashion Week runway in New York. His work was featured at the Museum of Arts and Design as part of the “Swept Away” exhibit, completing an indoor project “Asynchronous Syntropy” as well as circumambulating the entire museum for a marathon 24 hrs in two days. He participated in The Flag Art Foundation’s “Watch Your Step” exhibit and has installed at The Corcoran Gallery Rotunda in Washington D.C. Mangrum has held residencies at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, at the Ashé Cultural Center, New Orleans and The Red Gate Gallery, Beijing, where he was featured in the inaugural exhibit of the Sunshine Museum. He received the prestigious Lorenzo de Medici Award at the Florence Biennale in 2003, for his piece titled “Fragile”. Mangrum’s works have been commissioned by private collectors, The Asia Society, Prabal Gurung, Jen Kao and many others. In addition, he has received commissions from the City of San Francisco, including a permanent public artwork on the sidewalk of the Mission District. Other commissions include Coachella Music and Arts and other festivals. He has created a series of sand paintings in Miami during Art Fairs at Project Miami, Multitudes Gallery and Miami Art Space. Mangrum grew up Florissant, Missouri and later earned his degree in Fine Arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Working primarily as a painter, Mangrum embarked on years of travel inspired by natural wonders and indigenous sites of North America. He continued to travel internationally, making his own connections to cultural patterns. During this time, he began using plants and flowers that he collected to make ephemeral artworks. In 1995, he made San Francisco his home until 2008 and expanded his ephemeral works to include auto parts, technology and varieties of found and fabricated artifacts, presenting his first solo installation at San Francisco State University. His large scale installations continue in such manifestations inspired by mushroom clouds, pyramid shapes and the Ouroboros. Mangrum has also worked with educational programs, given artist’s presentations and panel discussions at School of Visual Arts, Adelphi University and SUNY Geneseo. He has demonstrated his work with students at The United Nations International School, The de Young Museum of San Francisco, Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York and Moton Elementary in New Orleans. He is an active supporter of environmental causes and has contributed efforts to Love For Japan, Riverkeeper Alliance, Natural World Museum, World Environment Day and Copenhagen 15. He has been featured on “Sesame Street,” and interviewed for the PBS program “Spark” on KQED. His work has been displayed in various publications including Antennae Journal in the UK. He has been featured on CNN, The New York Times, New York Daily News, LA Times, Artbusiness.com, Yahoo News and numerous blogs. In 2017 Joe was featured by the Emmy nominated online series Humans of New York (HONY). His sand covered hands share the cover of HONY’s NY times best seller by the same name.

http://www.joemangrum.com

https://vimeo.com/joemangrum

Partners Scott Chasse + Kenley Darling, working under the name “Signature Unknown” propose to design an original mural for the O+ Festival. They utilize geometric “quilt patterns” in much of their mural work, with their original take on this classic folk art form. Many of their designs already incorporate “X” patterns within the overall composition. They will create a new, original design with the “X” as a prominent geometric form as part of a repetitive series of “tiles” that connect to form the mural.

A primary theme in thier  work is connectivity. The quilt-like patterns they create are meant to evoke feelings of community, tradition, and unity. Just as quilts have been created and passed down for generations, often without any credit to their individual creators, they aim to recreate this tradition in a new form. Their moniker “Signature Unknown” is an ode to anonymous folk art predecessors.

www.scottchasse.com

www.signatureunknown.com

Robert will work with community members of Kingston to create a community mosaic mural, theme to be determined by the group.

Robert Markey is an artist who has worked in many media over the years including painting, sculpture, installation, video and mosaics. He has done public art projects in cities around the country including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston and Minneapolis. His first video was aired on PBS, and he received national media coverage for his public performance work on domestic violence. He has done mosaic murals in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Israel, India, Afghanistan and the U.S., and for the past several years he has traveled to Asia and Brazil to work with youth in vulnerable situations to do mosaic murals. He currently works out of his studio in Ashfield, Massachusetts and teaches at the Springfield Museum School.

robertmarkey.com