Buster Levi Gallery is pleased to present Into the New Year a group show by member artists at 121 Main Street in Cold Spring, New York. The exhibition will run from January 4, 2019 through January 27, 2019. The opening for the show will be on Friday January 4, 2018 from 6-8:30 pm.

This exhibition features a painter, a photographer and three sculptors. Each artist uses abstraction as a way to interpret their ideas, nature, or personal experiences, despite working with different mediums and formal approaches.

Ursula Schneider’s River Map is based on an accurate map of the path of a river in the Gates of the Artic in Alaska. The painting is a composite of eleven photographs taken from a low flying airplane that was following the river upstream. The colors used in the painting moving from left to right represent winter to fall. Though this painting is based on a specific image, it is a construction of experiences as opposed to a representation of the image at a specific moment.

The imagery in Lucille Tortora’s photographic montages is based on her experiences in the canyons of the American west such as Bryce Canyon. Referred to by Tortora as “Transformations” their overall compositional idea is inspired by Cubism in that these montages reveal the landscape from different points of view assembled together in the same image. The landscape is fragmented into positive and negative shapes.

In a manner similar to Schneider, Pat Hickman created her mixed media work Tumbleweed based on cumulative experiences. It was not inspired by an experience in a particular place, but rather as Hickman states; “ Though I move geographically, I take with me the cumulative experience of my places, somewhat like a tumbleweed, rolling across the prairie.” Thus the sculpture is more like a memory than a reconstruction of a particular place.

John Allen‘s sculptures are generally conceptual. In this work, a text: “I loved you before I even met you”, is meticulously engraved into a stone he found in a landscape supply yard. At times he accepts the stones just as he finds them and in some others he will square them up as needed. For Allen, the phrase evokes a feeling, clearly tied to emotions that can be either specific or suggestive. He has stated that he prefers to exhibit these works outside in natural surroundings so that they are as he states; “ a reminder. Like a string around your finger, only it’s a stone somewhere you come across, from time to time.”

Nancy Steinson’s welded steel sculpture Domnu is the most directly abstract work in the exhibition in that it is essentially geometric. The work consists of two tall rectangular forms on an almost square base that back into each other each twisting in opposite directions creating movement allowing the eye to travel around the sculpture. The ‘rusted’ color of the work however does suggest a relationship to the natural world as do the welds that impart a rougher texture to the work.

Buster Levi Gallery is open on Saturdays from 12-5 pm.

For more information: busterlevigallery.com