Second Exhibition
Talk Shop 2.0
On View Sat, June 3rd - Sun, September 10th
Talk Shop 2.0 is the second exhibition at the new Red Hook village storefront VERSE Work/Shop, co-curated by visual artist, Beka Goedde and Work/Shop Founder, Vanessa Shafer.
This exhibition culls together artist + makers that predominantly live and work in the Hudson Valley (+beyond). Talk Shop 2.0 includes ethereal ceramics; hand woven textiles; wooden panel and hand-woven textile painting, dimensional collage; wood-driven and mixed-media sculpture, and more.
Objects for looking are paired with objects for living, from the scale of a ring to a vast walnut dining table. All are made by hands of our dynamic region and/or of materials forged in it.
Talk Shop 2.0 is on view through September 10th.
Email info@verseworkshop.com
Featured Artists
Tania Alvarez (b. 1983, Seville, Spain) earned her MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2017 and BFA at Pratt Institute in 2005. Alvarez’s work has been exhibited at Miriam Gallery Brooklyn, NY, (solo); CHART, New York, NY; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; McNay Museum Print Fair, San Antonio, TX; Golden Artists Colors, New Berlin, NY; The Clinton Foundation, Harlem, NY; The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY; Delphian Gallery, London, UK; and Galeria Belard in Lisbon, Portugal among others. Alvarez’s works are in the permanent collections of the University Art Museum at the University at Albany and the Boise City Department of Arts and History in Boise, Idaho. Alvarez was an artist-in-residence at the James Castle House in Boise, ID; The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation in New Berlin, NY; The Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA; and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. She is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and currently works in Catskill, NY.
Samantha Bittman is a visual artist and educator based in the Hudson Valley, NY. In her practice, she works with woven patterning to generate paintings, graphic wallpapers, and tiled installations. She has participated in residency programs at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Ox-Bow School of Art. In 2012, she received the Artadia Award. Recent solo exhibitions include, Ronchini, London, UK; Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL; Morgan Lehman, NY, NY; and Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including David Castillo, Miami, FL; Shane Campbell, Chicago, IL; and Rhona Hoffman, Chicago, IL. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Wall Street International, and The Washington Post, amongst others. In 2022, she founded Catskill Weaving School, an artist-run school that offers in-person and online weaving and weaving-related workshops, based in Catskill, NY. She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.
Eric Conroe, a native of the United States, came to furniture-making after years spent as a choreographer, professional dancer, and writer of poems and novels. His furniture work focuses on pieces from design history that have played a silent but influential role and that display lightness, durability, and workability. These pieces often inspire new ideas and new takes on old forms, extending the tradition. His new collection of pieces, debuting at Field + Supply Fall 2023, will extend this philosophy to tables, chairs, desks, and worktables.
Elisa Finoli, the Founder of Aglaia Jewelry, is an Italian designer who lives and works in NY.
Her creations are born out of her passion for clean aesthetics, elegance and the beauty of nature. She gets inspirations from both her surroundings and far away cultures: her Italian roots and her life experiences living in beloved countries such as India and Nicaragua. Elisa also sites Japanese culture and the 'Wabi-Sabi' philosophy as a source of inspiration. A philosophy based on finding beauty in the imperfect. Imperfection becomes a form of freedom and acceptance, a celebration of nature.
Her aesthetic connection to balance and shape is a clear heritage from her background in design, architecture and photography.
An essential ingredient in her life and work is the consciousness of the world: respecting it, making it better, giving back.
All her pieces are handmade using recycled precious metals or fair-mined gold, pearls and stones are ethically sourced, use of chemicals is limited, her packaging is as sustainable as possible and in her studio uses renewable energy.
Kenji Fujita was born into a family of artists steeped in mid-century American abstraction and Japanese aesthetics. His art plays freely with these influences, recreating and destroying inherited forms in order to produce new improvisations. He works in series, drawing on commonplace geometries of shape, line and form and uses ordinary materials such as cardboard, aluminum foil, felt, wood, fabric, paper and paint. For his "flat" works such as Wood Grain Fabric (2014), Fujita’s cloth shapes are cut, torn and glued into unexpected amalgams of order and disorder; With his three-dimensional works, such as Excavation (2018-19) Fujita makes small sculptures out of odd pieces of old work retrieved from the studio floor that are cut, crushed, stuffed, turned around, smoothed over, painted and repainted. Amalgams of new work are layered over old work; With Accumulation #19 (2016), these same relations of shape, form and structure become animated as the viewer engages with the work in physical space and time.
Fujita has been making sculpture, painting and works on paper for over 40 years and has shown his work extensively both in the U.S. and Internationally. He has received grants and fellowships from NYFA (Sculpture), NEA (Sculpture and Works on Paper), Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and the John S. Guggenheim Foundation. Fujita received a BA from Bennington College, an MFA from Queens College (SUNY) and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Born in New York City, he currently lives and works in Staatsburg, NY. He teaches at Bard College and SVA.
Ken Landauer designs and makes zero-waste, body-fit, durable furniture in the Hudson Valley. He founded FN Furniture in 2017 as a social and ecological art project rooted in decades of art-making, teaching, woodwork, and daily yoga practice.
FN now furnishes the Museum of Arts and Design on Columbus Circle in NYC, The Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY, The Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, NY, the Williams College Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and hundreds of homes.
Jess Ludwicki is the farmer and fiber artist behind Love Lamb NY.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York - Jess relocated to the Catskill Mountains with her husband Steve in 2015 and they began to slowly build their homestead.
Determined to find a reason to add sheep to their growing farm, Jess spent months researching everything that could be made with wool. Felt making seemed to come naturally to her, and while she now has her own small flock of sheep, she continues to source wool locally from fiber farms across New England.
Jess is both a self-taught farmer and fiber artist. She is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin School where she studied photography and music.
Liza McLaughlin / LB Felt
McLaughlin’s childhood was spent in the bucolic environs of Northern New England. She studied drawing, printmaking, ceramics and art history at Connecticut College and the University of East Anglia. In the early 90’s, after gaining her BFA, she moved to NYC and began her career as an artist’s project assistant and arts educator.
It was on the streets of the Lower East Side in Manhattan, while working for the Artist Kiki Smith, that McLaughlin learned to make felt. Working with wool batting, friction, and water from an open fire hydrant, she trod woolen blankets into existence – as if by magic. Shortly after this “street felt” experience, McLaughlin set up her own felt and jewelry making studio on a pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It was there that she began creating large scale felts and taking on private design commissions.
McLaughlin credits a 2009 exhibition at The Cooper-Hewitt Museum in NYC titled Fashioning Felt - a comprehensive overview of the varied uses of felt in contemporary design, for reigniting her love of felt making – and was especially inspired by the archaic processes of the Nomadic peoples of Mongolia.
Muriel Norman / Down Under Faux
Muriel Norman, is a British Australian artist specializing in Decorative Paint and Plaster finishes. 2001 Muriel moved to California from Australia, relocated to Red Hook in 2004 after coming to the area for what was to be a two week project. Her work has included Migdale Mansion, (Andrew Carnegie Estate), The Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park, (Escoffier), Sotheby’s New York, Stanford White Carriage House (Skyler Estate Rhinebeck) to name a few. The majority of her work is in residential and with her experience often provides creative solutions at affordable rates for her clients. Purchasing and renovating her first home at the age of 18 sparked what was to be a life long passion of transforming spaces and surfaces. Muriel spent most of her career in Australia in Sales and Marketing in various industries before having that ‘aha’ moment when watching an Oprah Winfrey show on ‘The Business of Bliss’ (How To Profit From Doing What You Love) by author Janet Allon. Once in the United States, Muriel delved heavily into professional training in the Faux Finishing Industry, Concrete Finishes, Epoxy, Modern and Old World finishes to name a few. Muriel also has been featured in multiple Architectural Magazines in America, Art Books and in 2007 was one of 60 people throughout the world selected to showcase her skills at The Meeting of The Masters in Dallas Texas. Muriel often renovates and oversees homes for her clients and has a selected team of contractors and artists who work together on projects of any scale.
New York Heartwoods is a women owned and operated bespoke furniture fabrication studio located in a 100% solar-powered workshop in Accord, NY. Their practice is deeply committed to sustainability and to the life cycle of the creation of their pieces. Often they work with fallen lumber or wood they are intimately involved in the milling of. Their furniture is designed to create solutions to a changing climate and honor the natural beauty of Hudson Valley.
Paris Smeraldo started working in ceramics while in college and after a long hiatus returned in recent years to making both functional and sculptural work at his studio in the Hudson Valley, which is called Ugly Mud Studio.
Much of his functional work is wheel thrown and altered or faceted. Experimentation in the firing process has also led to work employing various raku techniques.
Ugly Mud Studio is described as a “multi-generational ceramics studio”, in that his father, Richard (86) and daughter, Francesca (12) are also clay artists and sell their wares through the studio. In 2023 Ugly Mud expanded into a new space and offers studio membership and classes. The studio operates a road-side pottery stand on Route 66 in Columbia County that offers affordable ceramic wares for the community.
Smith’s work has a restlessness, casting an imaginative bridge between what is seen and what is not yet recognized. It moves horizontally, from an intuitive focus, out from mutability with its flexible and supple power, and into abstraction, shape, color and figuration. Attention is most drawn to where the meaning and definition of a work is in a suspended, subterranean, and generously fluid state.
This liminal space, its particular slipperiness, reflects the eccentric complexity and fullness of life as Gret knows it. Using an array of materials and media, such as ceramic, scavenged wood, encaustic, Aqua resin, oil and acrylic paint, photographs, fabric, styrofoam, wire, metal, cardboard and paper, frequently repurposing discards and offcuts and things found at the local dump.
Julianne Swartz creates immersive, multi-sensory installations, as well as sculptures and photographs. Her work synthesizes sound, light, air, magnetism and physical materials into ephemeral and participatory experiences. Exhibition venues include: the Tate Liverpool Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art (2004 Biennial exhibition) the New Museum, the Jewish Museum, NY, NY, MoMA PS1, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, Jerusulem, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. A Percent for Art permanent commission for the City of New York was completed in 2019 in the Hunters Point Library designed by architect Steven Holl. Awards include the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship in Music and Sound, Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters Artist Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painters and Sculptors, and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Sculpture. Julianne lives and works in Stone Ridge, New York. She is on the faculty at Bard College and serves on the board of Governors for the Skowhegan School of Art.
Traci Pinczes of Swish & Hammer is a textile artist and jewelry designer. Pinczes often works with hand dyed recycled silks to create dense tapestries in muted, natural tones, as well as, intricate beaded jewelry, and hand soldered goods. With a sincere dedication to hand-made craft and recycled materials, each piece profoundly captures the organic beauty of imperfection and the joy of difference evident in the art of craft.
Allison Toepp is an artist and farmer. The objects she creates are functional works of art, handmade from materials that are dear to her. This is her way of celebrating Allison’s cows and her community.
Emi Winter was born and grew up in Oaxaca, Mexico. She holds a BA in visual arts from Oberlin College and a MFA in painting from Bard College. Her work includes painting, drawing, printmaking and textiles which she makes in collaboration with master artisans in Mexico and the United States. She was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas in 2001 and Ateliers Hoeherweg in Dusseldorf in 2006. In 2011 she was awarded the acquisition prize for the XV edition of the Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial in Mexico. Her work is included in the collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico; Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Mexico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio and the Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She lives in South Orange, New Jersey and teaches bilingual art classes for the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.
Withers Studio (Formerly Withers & Grain) is a design build company founded in Brooklyn. Today, they fabricate their highly crafted custom furniture in their Red Hook work studio. Their pieces are modern, yet, timeless with a deep understanding of the materials involved. Their exquisite level of craft is uncompromised by handling their own production. Withers & Grain work exhibits that the details of construction and means of making it are an inherent part of design itself.
Exhibit Gallery
