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Greylock Arts in Adams Celebrates Five Years

Foremost Alternative Gallery in the Berkshires

By: - Jul 17, 2012

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The New York based multi media artists, Matt Belanger and Marianne Petit, bought a building on once lively, commercial Summer Street in Adams several years ago.

On the street level was a storefront that housed a clothing store back in the day when the town was bustling with nearby mills. The beautiful oak trimmed space, with projecting windows flanking a deep set entrance, has been brought back to life as an artist run, project space Greylock Arts. The name derives from the view of Mt. Greylock from their windows. During breaks from teaching they live on the floors above.

Because of their involvement in aspects of multi media art they have brought unique curatorial insights to the exhibitions they curate. The mandate is to present lively and interesting new work. They always organize projects thematically and then draw upon resources available through a confluence of Berkshire based and New York artists.

Their program has attracted a loyal audience conflating artists and curators in the Berkshires as well as neighbors. They have become an integral part of the community particularly among residents with little prior involvement in the visual arts.

Although gallery hours are limited there is always something going on in the generous window spaces. It is always enticing to drive by and take a look.

The current exhibition, which opens this week on Friday, July 20, provides an overview of participants in the past five years.

Greylock Arts Fifth Year Anniversary Exhibition

Greylock Arts

Exhibit Dates & Times:
July 20th – September 2nd 2012
Admission is free and open to the public.
Open Saturdays 1 – 4 p.m. and by appointment.
Appointments can be made by phone or email.

Opening Reception:
Friday July 20th 2012, 5:30 – 8:30 p.m.

Location:
93 Summer Street, Adams, MA 01220

Participating Artists

Larry Alice. “If you keep looking there should be more to see. it should be colorful and sexy and funny, and it should keep evolving”. Now a North Adams resident, Larry spent most of his life in NYC.

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo. Gabriel Barcia-Colombo’s work focuses on memorialization and, more specifically, the act of leaving one’s imprint for the next generation. While formally implemented by natural history museums and collections (which find their roots in Renaissance era “cabinets of curiosity”), this process has grown more pointed and pervasive in the modern-day obsession with personal digital archiving and the corresponding growth of social media culture. His video sculptures play upon this exigency in our culture to chronicle, preserve and wax nostalgic, an idea which Barcia-Colombo renders visually by “collecting” human beings (alongside cultural archetypes) as scientific specimens. Gabriel repurposes everyday objects like blenders, suitcases and cans of Spam® into venues for projecting and inserting videos of people. While making conspicuous references to Marcel Duchamps’ ‘Ready-Mades,’ he also draws from an eclectic range of other influences, from the combines of Robert Rauschenberg and the video spectacles of Aernout Mik to taxonomy texts and anatomical drawings.

Ithai Benjamin. Ithai Benjamin is a New York City based composer, performer and engineer. He makes dolls, puppets, robots, colorful instruments and interactive installations and uses technology and animation to tell stories that are otherwise impossible to tell. His work has been published in Make Magazine and the book Handmade Electronic Music. His band of robotic puppets “The Princes of Persuasion” have performed at Exit Art, The Tank, 2010 New York Fringe Festival, Cameo Gallery, 92YTribeca and more. Ithai teaches the class “Puppets and Performing Objects” at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Kay Canavino. Kay Canavino grew up in Manhattan, Illinois, a small farming community outside of Chicago. The images of those natural surroundings provided a major influence for her photography. From Illinois, Kay moved to Boston and graduated from Northeastern University. She then earned a Professional Diploma from the New England School of Photography and began her serious pursuit of photography. Her move to the Berkshires in 2002 allowed her to reconnect with the natural environment as subject. Kay’s fine art photography is mostly organic: still-lifes of plants and animals, hand-colored photographs of natural subjects, and night landscapes and portraits using light-painting techniques. Her photographs are included in corporate, museum and private collections and have been exhibited at various national and regional juried exhibitions. These have included the Danforth Art Museum, the Berkshire Museum, the Fitchburg Museum of Art, the Somerville Museum, and university galleries at MCLA, Tufts, Harvard, MIT and Northeastern, the Eclipse Mill Gallery, the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Joan Carney. To be brief, both of my undergraduate degrees are from state schools in Massachusetts and both are in the visual arts, with a painting concentration. “Running solo” after my college years, I chose to leave painting behind, out of necessity, for employment in the visual arts, creating commercial signage and page layout. I worked in window display and with further education and apprenticeship, have been a milliner for the past two decades. I lived in Seattle, Boston and New York during that time. After nine years in New York, I moved back to Massachusetts, when mom died, to be closer to family and to help run a non-profit, community art center in the Pittsfield, the Berkshire Artisans. Incorporating all of my prior job experience and education, I successfully ran the art center, as assistant director, preparator, curator and teacher. We inherited an additional space from the City when they bought the former England Bros. Dept. Store. We relegated the windows as our Annex space, choosing a program chiefly to all local artists, from live performance art to 2 and 3 dimensional work. Spending so much of my time with art and artists, it followed naturally I would get a studio downtown and that I would begin to paint, once again. I consider myself a formalist painter. I have developed an original technique of painting on glass, which came from the need to paint with immediacy. Much of the originality of my process comes from having spent much of the past twenty years exploring the media.

Laura Christensen. Laura Christensen grew up with rural and Midwestern ideals, such as polite actions, hard work, and small communities. Influences expanded to include the metropolitan buzz of New York City, airy valleys and giant peaks of the Rocky Mountains, older mountain woods of New England, fifteenth century Italian frescoes, family gatherings, friends, and maple syrup. In universities, she studied many subjects, accomplishing the B.A. in German, the B.S. in Economics, graduate work in art history, and the M.F.A. in Drawing. She’s exhibited many places, including Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, Offenes Haus Oberwart in Austria, The Art Center of the Capital Region in Troy, New York, and Kidspace at MASS MoCA. For completion of work for the Kidspace show, she was awarded an Artists’ Resource Trust (A.R.T.) Grant, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. In addition to focusing on her own art career, she teaches Drawing at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) and shares her North Adams’ home with her playful husband, Greg Scheckler, and two purring cats, Jupiter and Masaccio.

Jody Culkin. Jody Culkin is an artist who has shown her sculptures, photographs and new media pieces at museums and galleries throughout this country, including P.S 1, the Neuberger Museum, the Bronx Museum, Greylock Arts, and internationally, including IV Salon y Coloquio International de Arte Digital in Havana, Cuba; Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome Italy; Amerika Haus in Cologne, Germany; Canterbury Arts Festival in Canterbury, England. She received an Artists Fellowship in Sculpture from the New York Foundation on the Arts, a sponsored project grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, a Design Award from the New York City Department of Transportation, and a research fellowship from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Department. She is currently a Professor at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College in the Media Arts and Technology Department, where she is Deputy Chair. She has a BA from Harvard University in Visual Studies and and MPS from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Department.

Karylee Doubiago. Quilting has always appealed to me. There is a sense of comfort, warmth and texture in traditional quilts that drew me in to working with fiber. My first attempts at quilting during college were so dreadful that I gave up quilting for nearly 15 years. When I finally came around to fiber again, I studied and learned all the rules and techniques. Now years later I am able to focus more deeply on the concepts, beliefs, images and content of the work with out having the technical mechanics stand in my way. My current work focuses on exploring the internal views of the human mind and the internal and external physical body landscape. To focus on the introspective change, the struggles and joys that we as humans share. To convey what I see takes more than one medium or technique. I love the idea of taking a traditional process and create something new and unexpected. My quilts are a mix of photography paints, and dyes, threadwork and fabric manipulation. I utilize whatever technique it requires to tell the complete story. I have recently become fascinated with x-rays, using the physical attributes of a human to invoke a response from the viewer.

Charles Giuliano. Charles Giuliano is an artist resident of the Eclipse Mill loft complex in North Adams, Mass. The image in this exhibition at Greylock Arts combines collaged individual prints from several sources. It is a fantasy view of the popular Lake Windsor in North Adams. It is known locally as Fish Pond and in this surreal composition reconfigured with swimmers and wild life as Duck Pond. This evokes another way of looking at nature which initially might seem quite probable. The work is from an ongoing series in which the artist shot panoramas of color print film which presented a range of possibilities when combined with other motifs in the studio. Before moving to the Berkshires several years ago he was a professor of art history and the humanities with a position teaching the arts and humanities and running the exhibition program for the New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University. As an adjunct he taught at Boston University, U. Mass. Lowell and other universities. For the past six years he had been the publisher/ editor of Berkshire Fine Arts an on line magazine. He has held staff and editor positions at Art New England, The Boston Herald Traveler, The Boston Phoenix, Art News, The Avatar and other publications. Giuliano is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and The International Society of Art Critics.

Jo-Anne Green. Jo-Anne Green is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., a small, not-for-profit experimental arts organization whose current projects include Turbulence.org, Networked_Performance, Networked_Music_Review, Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) and Upgrade! Boston. She also teaches part-time at Emerson College. Green grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. After graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BFA Honors in Printmaking and Art History, she emigrated to the United States in 1983. While studying for her MFA at UMASS Dartmouth, she volunteered for a Fund for a Free South Africa (1985-1992). Green founded the artist-in-residence program at the University of New Mexico’s High Performance Computing Center (1999); she subsequently managed the Art Technology Center (ATC) until June 2001. Upon returning to Boston, Green completed her MS in Art Administration at Lesley University (2003). She has exhibited her paintings, one-of-a-kind artist’s books, and installations in South Africa, Boston and New York.

Richard Harrington. Richard Harrington is a visual artist whose media include sculpture, installation and printmaking. His interests are light and perceptual illusion. Recent works are folded metal screen variations of the Platonic and Semi Regular Solids. Richard has exhibited at The Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, Cambridge, MA; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; The Kunstmuseum of Herning Denmark, The DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; The City of Cambridge Millennial Celebration, Cambridge, MA; GreylockArts, Adams, MA; First Night, Boston, MA; and Hudson’s Fine Art & Antiques, North Adams, MA. Principal collections include The Fogg Art Museum Harvard University permanent print collection, The Gund Collection, Cambridge, MA; and Lang Origami, Berkeley, California.

Ephraim & Sadie Hatfield. Ephraim & Sadie Hatfield create interactive public works that explore themes such as consumer culture, relational exchanges, gift economies, performance, history and collecting. This reclusive couple has been producing art together since the mid-2000s. Their exact origins, an “ever evolving tale of half-lies and outright contradictions”, can only be guessed at. Some have suggested that Ephraim & Sadie Hatfield have forged their identities in order to remain anonymous. To this they say, “Balderdash! If we wanted to live in obscurity do you think we’d have a website?” Their work can be currently seen at Kidspace at Mass MoCA’s Curiosity exhibition.

Henry Klein. Streams and Rocks. I share my appreciation of nature through painting it and showing it.

Leif Krinkle. For more than ten years Leif Krinkle has been collaborating with artists, musicians and designers from around the world, developing multidimensional media and challenging the potential of traditional art forms. In 2000 Leif created Krinkle New Media, a production company specializing in interactive sound and video production. He has since produced albums for internationally acclaimed musicians, designed multimedia performances, and engineered interactive installations. Today Leif is fabricating musical robots, designing large nonlinear display systems, and engineering physical devices for interaction with immersive multimedia environments. He is also the director of the Visible Futures Lab at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

David Lachman. David Lachman is an interdisciplinary artist who works in painting, installation, and video. He earned his MFA in painting and video from Northwestern University, and has been exhibited at museums, galleries and alternative venues spanning the globe in over 20 countries on 6 continents, including the The Cultural Centre of Fljotsdahsherao in Egilsstaoir, Iceland, and the Amundson-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica. In 2009, after decades of fascination with insects he became a beekeeper.

Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo is a Brooklyn-based Colombian digital artist, technologist and educator. She is particularly interested in time and transience. Her artwork has been internationally exhibited and performed, including at Giacobetti Paul Gallery, Exit Art and HERE Arts (NYC), UCLA Hammer Museum (LA), Point Éphémère (Paris) and the Museums of Modern Art in Bogotá and Medellín (Colombia). She recently self-published “Of and In Cities,” an academically framed art book about five of her photographic projects, and “Cross Urban,” which documents the first two years of an ongoing collaboration with Klaus Fruchtnis. Cynthia has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from New York University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Design in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design and an active member of Madarts, an arts collective in Brooklyn, NY.

John A. Lissee. As a photographer, John A. Lisee seeks to record a past that has all but disappeared. His photographs depict detailed views of corroded machinery and abandoned buildings with an eye that intensifies compositional abstraction through intersecting forms and surface tactility. In this way he gathers the intangible answers hidden in objects that are physically present but have lost their daily usefulness. Lisee draws attention to the overlooked by isolating his subject from the surrounding context, pulling the viewer into the image by focusing directly on a subject ordinarily ignored.

Lisa Nilsson I am a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design where I studied Illustration, and more recently of the McCann Technical School’s medical assisting program, where my life-long aesthetic interest in anatomy and cool-looking medical things grew a bit more informed. I live in North Adams, Massachusetts.

E.J. Park. Eun Jung(EJ) Park is an automata sculptor, curricula designer and mechanical engineer. The focus of her work is constructing self-operating sculptural mechanisms, which are often called “automata” for use as art and educational purposes. She holds a B.F.A in Visual Information Design from Ewha Women’s University in Seoul and a Masters degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Since 2010, she works at Vision Education & Media as a LEGO robotics curriculum developer. She also has done several workshops for children with the automata projects that she designed.

Tristan Perich. Tristan Perich’s (New York) work is inspired by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics and code. The WIRE Magazine describes his compositions as “an austere meeting of electronic and organic.” 1-Bit Music, his 2004 release, was the first album ever released as a microchip, programmed to synthesize his electronic composition live. His latest circuit album, 1-Bit Symphony (Cantaloupe, 2010) has received critical acclaim, called “sublime” (New York Press), and the Wall Street Journal said “its oscillations have an intense, hypnotic force and a surprising emotional depth.” His award winning work coupling 1-bit electronics with traditional forms in both music (Active Field, Observations) and visual art (Machine Drawings, Microtonal Wall) has been presented around the world, from Sonar and Ars Electronica to the Whitney Museum and bitforms gallery.

Rich Remsberg. Rich Remsberg’s short films and other work draw from found and archival historical material. His work has shown at the Walker Art Center, the Bowery Ballroom, and Slamdance Film Festival, and he is a regular contributor to NPR’s online feature, the Picture Show, and Esopus Magazine. He lives in North Adams.

Sean Riley. Sean Riley received his BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA in 1999 and his MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. Upon graduating from UPenn, Riley received the Charles Addams Memorial Scholarship from the University and was also awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. Riley works in several media such as drawing, painting, fabric, sculpture, and performance. He has exhibited in group shows throughout the east coast and has upcoming solo exhibitions at MCLA Gallery 51 in North Adams, MA and the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY. Riley currently lives and works in North Adams, MA.

Dan Rose. Dan Rose an artist, anthropologist, and designer had a studio in Adams, MA, named for the store it was in, Bob’s Used Furniture and Appliances, which is now an ice cream parlor. He lives in Philadelphia and is presently working with Steamroller Labs on a collaborative art and photography project. Greylock Arts hosted Rose’s one person show, “Secret Century,” in 2009. His artist books have been sold in London through the ICA and Serpentine Galleries and in New York through Printed Matter. Some of his automobiles have been featured in advertising, and in books and magazines. In the spring of this year he taught in the Graduate Industrial Design Department at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. A selection of his drawings is currently on view in the Gramercy Bistro at MassMoCA.

Martha Rose. Martha Denmead Rose I have a BA in art history from Cornell University, and an MA in art history and MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania. My painting is a contemplation of the natural world and its meanings. To me, nature holds unlimited mysteries. “Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war…Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot remember or has gotten wrong…Bereft of instinct, he must search continually for meanings.” —Loren Eiseley.

Jeremy Rotsztain. Jeremy Rotsztain (b. 1977 Toronto, Canada) is a Portland, Oregon-based digital artist who, taking cues from the practice of painting, works with movies, images, and sound as a kind of malleable and expressive material. In his work, popular narratives, pixels, and sound bites are sampled, transformed, re-arranged and composed in an effort to examine the language and patterns of contemporary media and the shared cultural experiences that we have with them. As part of his practice, Jeremy writes custom software, enabling him to collect, edit, and compose with his materials in hybrid and unconventional ways. His work has been screened, performed and exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt and the New York Hall of Science in NYC, Urban Screens in Melbourne, Subtle Technologies and InterAccess in Toronto, Electric Fields in Ottawa, SAT in Montreal, and New Forms Festival in Vancouver.

Daniel Rozin. Daniel Rozin is an artist, educator and developer, working in the area of interactive digital art. As an interactive artist Rozin creates installations and sculptures that have the unique ability to change and respond to the presence and point of view of the viewer. In many cases the viewer becomes the contents of the piece and in others the viewer is invited to take an active role in the creation of the piece. Even though computers are often used in Rozin’s work, they are seldom visible. As an educator, Rozin is Associate Arts Professor at ITP, Tisch School Of The Arts, NYU where he teaches such classes as: “The World- Pixel by Pixel”, “Designing for Digital Fabrication”, “Project Development Studio” and “Toy Design Workshop”. Born in Jerusalem and trained as an industrial designer Rozin lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited and collected widely with solo exhibitions in the US and internationally and featured in publications such as The New York Times, Wired, ID, Spectrum and Leonardo. His work has earned him numerous awards including Prix Ars Electronica, ID Design Review and the Chrysler Design Award.

Gordon Sasaki. NYC artist Gordon Sasaki explores the intersection of life and art through his work. A wheelchair user since a 1982 auto accident, he explores the human body as an aesthetic form and container of meaning. A simultaneously universal and intimately personal object. Among other things this piece investigates meaning as defined by the relationship between the artist and his work.

Gregory Shakar Gregory Shakar is an artist and musician whose work seeks to reveal the emotive implications of electronic media and physical devices. His interests lie in the intersection of sculpture, installation art, product design, performance and computational media. His interactive installations have employed over-sized undulating pixels, melodic electrical arcs and towering sonorous metronomes. Shakar’s solo work and collaborative performances have been presented worldwide, including venues in New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, Barcelona, and Geneva. He has been an Artist in Residence at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria and served as both a Fellow and a Resident Researcher at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). He has received First Prize for Digital Art from the VAD Festival, a Bronze Prize from I.D. Magazine’s Interactive Design Review and an Honorable Mention from Prix Ars Electronica. Shakar holds a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an MPS from ITP where he is currently an Adjunct Professor. He is a life-long resident of New York City.

Gregory Scheckler. Gregory Scheckler is well-known for his lively, realistic paintings of birds. These colorful, avian action-portraits serve as an ongoing meditation on the forms and beauties of nature, life, the theory of evolution and theories of representation in visual art. Although these days he’s focused on painting, his creativity has often embraced many forms and styles including progressive realism, landscape, art brut, mixed media collage, photography, photojournalism, mail art, poetry, higher education teaching and program-building, and skiing.

Daniel Shiffman. Daniel Shiffman works as an Assistant Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Originally from Baltimore, Daniel received a BA in Mathematics and Philosophy from Yale University and a Master’s Degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program. He works on developing tutorials, examples, and libraries for Processing, the open source programming language and environment created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. He is the author of Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction and The Nature of Code (self-published via Kickstarter), an upcoming text and series of code examples about simulating natural phenomenon in Processing.

Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger. Book and print artist, Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, makes a mix personal journal, documentary and impressionistic narrative. Nathaniel Stern produces experimental installations, video, Internet art, prints and texts. Together, they combine new and traditional media into multidimensional images. They permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating “moving images on paper.” Their collaborative work has been exhibited worldwide, and featured in a variety of newspapers, magazines, books, collections and more. Their most recent work, “13 Views of a Journey,” was a commission for the Haggerty Museum in Wisconsin, and they are currently working on their second collaborative solo exhibition for GALLERY AOP in Johannesburg, South Africa. Both are professors of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Diane Sullivan. Diane Sullivan lives in North Adams, MA in the Eclipse Mill with her wife Jill and their cats, Bruno and Suki. After graduating with a MFA in ceramics from U Mass, Dartmouth in 1990, Diane taught in Portugal and then moved to Colorado for 10 years. While teaching at Colorado College she realized she missed the east coast where she grew up. After moving to Boston, she heard about the Eclipse Mill project and she & Jill moved to the Berkshires. The enormousness of their live/work loft space influenced the scale of her figurative work, which has become smaller and more intimate.. The vibrant artist community, the natural beauty of the area and the intrigue of small town politics continue to inspire her.

Mary Ann Wojtaszek. Upon returning to her home in Adams after 23 years away, Mary Ann Wojtaszek was drawn to the beauty of the Greylock Glen and found herself there nearly every afternoon with her sister and four legged friend Iza. Her panoramic camera went with her and captured four seasons of the beauty of the area.

Ven Voisey. Ven Voisey is a multi-disciplinary artist, working in sculpture, installation, painting, and sound. His practice, however, is unified by an overarching interest in communication — the possibility or impossibility of translation — between each other and one’s self, across circumstance and species, and through time and technology. Born in Richmond, CA, Voisey grew up in the East Bay Area of Northern California. In 2000, he received a BA from San Francisco State University in a self-designed major combining Humanities, Electronic music , Film, and Conceptual Art. For several years, he continued his education outside of school by working, touring and collaborating with kinetic sculpture and installation collective Amorphic Robot Works, building machines, learning fundamental electronics, and composing music. In 2003, Voisey moved to North Adams, MA where he has been worked with a variety of arts organizations (MASS MoCA, MCLA Gallery 51, Clark Art Institute, Images Cinema…) and making his own work in his studio. In 2010 he was Artist-in-Residence at the Berkshire Museum and was awarded the Individual Artist grant from Local Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire. His work was included in the 2012 deCordova Biennial at deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. In 2013 he will be taking part in the Roswell Artist in Residence Program in Roswell, New Mexico.