Land, Air, Place
Natasha Maidoff, Debra Ramsay, Elizabeth Riley, Holly Sears
Curated by Leslie Kerby
April 8th – May 8th, 2016

Artists Talk: Saturday, April 30th at 2:30pm

Project ARTspace is pleased to present Land, Air, Place curated by Leslie Kerby and featuring work by Natasha Maidoff, Debra Ramsay, Elizabeth Riley, and Holly Sears. In a present day “mash-up” of color, swagger, humor, skill, and solitary moments, this exhibition through these artists’ works, posits a conversation between Remington, Bonheur, Muybridge, Pendergast, Seurat, Delauney, Chamberlain, Cole, and Bierstadt.

Natasha Maidoff uses the natural world as a backdrop where she incorporates physical theater, layering it with digital media to create visual textures of projection and performance in excerpts from her “Live Cinema!” triptychs, The Cowgirl and The Sleepwalker. In the The Cowgirl, the performer lies on her back in the dark on a horse, as mountains are projected onto her body; text appears telling a story of loss and a dramatic shift in life. In The Sleepwalker, she journeys through dreams into the land of the known and unknown, but finds herself trapped, hammering on the walls of invisible boxes, searching for a way out.

Debra Ramsay’s absorbing dance with the landscape started in 2014 and proceeds as she continues to mine the trails of New Berlin, New York and Bethany, Connecticut selecting individual colors from her seasonal trips to create abstract sculptural pieces for this exhibition.The colors, presented both in a systematic grid and lyrically playful way, allow us to “gauge the color of the seasons changing and thereby glimpse time passing and time paused, feel the coupling of art and nature—and quietly savor the abundantly satisfying pleasures of both.”

Elizabeth Riley starts her sculptural process with standalone videos that are mining new experiences and environments, based on a consciousness of place and influenced by living in New York City for many years. Riley combines 2-D video media—printouts of sequential video stills sometimes on extended lengths of inkjet paper often with 3-D physical materials such as raw plywood, furniture and found materials.The sculptures are architectural, angular and alive—living cities that explore both human connection and disconnection in these environments.

Luminous depth and mirror like surfaces created by painting with thin oil glazes makes you think that Holly Sears hung out with the Hudson River painters.This slow and sometimes tedious technique allows Sears to construct and collage the elements of her paintings—“giving veracity to what might otherwise be conceived as unbelievable content.” Like the other artists in the exhibition Sears is awed and inspired by the landscape and the mystery and amorality of nature. And so, with a blend of surrealism, naturalism, ritual and digital phenomena these artists hold forth with new conversations about land, air and place.