October 5–November 4, 2024 Bushel is pleased to present “Symbiocene Era: Artists Envision Environmental Symbiosis,” an exhibition guest curated by multimedia artist, activist, and educator Kathleen Sweeney. This show features the work of eleven women artists exploring diverse pathways of integration and collaboration with nature in their artistic output as painters, storytellers, artisans, interdisciplinary artists, found-object sculptors, photographers, and videographers who inhabit the rural area of the Catskills watershed in New York State. They are Sarah Bachinger, Susie Bellamy, Toni Brogan, Sharon Horvath, Christina Hunt Wood, Robin Kahn, Emily Johnston, Rachel Owens, Heather Phelps-Lipton, Christie Scheele, Kathleen Sweeney. Guest curator Kathleen Sweeney explains: “Symbiocene” takes its root from “Symbiosis,” or ‘living together’ to co-create and envision a world of mutual respect for all living beings, beyond the human-centrism of the Anthropocene Era. The exhibition concept focuses on envisioning a world of collaboration with nature in all aspects of creative revisioning of our relationship to diversity, honoring our homeland, and expanding alliances to protect the ecosystems of the Catskills and beyond. These are artists, solutionists, ecoartivists, and changemakers who are integrating creative practices into deeply engaged environmental awareness, expanding what it means to be responsible creators. This includes questioning their own carbon footprints through creative reuse and art material sourcing while moving out of the studio into community to help co-create a world beyond dystopia and despair. Please join us for the opening reception of the exhibition on October 5, 4–7 pm; with remarks at 5 pm. And in conjunction with the show, Bushel will host a film screening of “How to Power a City” on Saturday, October 19 and an earth pigment painting workshop by participating artist Emily Johnston on Saturday, October 26.
1053 Gallery is pleased to present, Jewels & Binoculars, a two-person exhibition of new works by Susie Bellamy and Sharon Horvath, which examines the relationship between material and ground and the shapes that found objects and paint take when transmuted by mind, spirit, time and the elements.
Jewels & Binoculars is a nod to the lyrics in the seminal Bob Dylan song, Visions of Johanna, which according to music critic, Greil Marcus, “is asking different sorts of questions. Such as: Where are you? Who are you? What are you doing here?” he says. “Visions of Johanna makes a narrative solely out of atmosphere.”
For the artists, the song’s opening line, Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet? precisely captures the solitary studio practice of the artist wrestling with the muse. The title also references the exquisite detail and faceted quality inherent in both Bellamy’s and Horvath’s works, which absorb and refract light, and ask the viewer to shift perspective as they zoom in and out of the pieces to engage with them.
There’s an invisible antenna that connected the two artists long before they met in 2021: they both lived on Dobbin Street in Brooklyn and in Ridgewood, Queens before their eventual meeting at Diamond Hollow Books in Andes, owned by Bellamy’s husband, Miles Bellamy, and the site of Susie’s Shamanic Reiki healing practice. An earlier work by Bellamy, Hilma, 2004, references a period when she was thinking about the work of Hilma af Klint and Horvath, who she’d been introduced to through an Art in America article twenty years before their meeting. Another painting featured in the exhibition by Bellamy, Friend Make Talking, is a geography of later conversations between her and Horvath, and a love letter to one of Bellamy’s inspirations, the late artist Tom Nozkowski.
The symbiotic bond between Bellamy and Horvath grew out of their shared Hungarian heritage, their love for painting, the natural world, and their contemplations on the nature of reality and consciousness. Both of the artists’ works are elemental, and weave their spiritual practices into their art, an important aspect of both their lives. Whereas Bellamy’s work seems to freeze light and open a moment in time through ceremony, taking on the metaphysical, and incorporating her ability to channel as a Shamanic Reiki practitioner, Horvath’s work speaks to the concept of impermanence, as taken from her Tibetan Buddhist practice, and her working process, which is ever in perpetuity, a painting never being “finished,” she says, until she “disappears.”
Art has always been a way for Bellamy to make sense of the otherworldly experiences she’s had throughout her life. She uses her hands to make art and to heal, so the two practices are intertwined. There’s a particularly luminous quality in her recent paintings, including Two Jewels, which function as talismans to her relationships to plant, animal and human spirits, and the visions and medicine she channels. Embryonic and mandorla shapes feature prominently in her works, and her recent Elemental series, incorporate, for example, snow and rain, into their making. Shaboo is the sound of a word in the Samish language that means a personal wisdom story, but the painting is also a mirror, a hole in the sky, and a portal to meeting other aspects of Self.
Horvath’s work contemplates temporal systems to speak to the transitory nature of being. The body of work featured in the exhibition comprises many variations on the color green, and infuses plant motifs with ephemera she finds amusing or interesting to speak to the absurdity, whimsy and challenges of being alive. Her paintings are an extension of her mind, and a melding of material and thought. They are spacious, formless things that become form through collaged materials (including costume jewels), paint and paper, and function like mycelia networks, wormholes, or in one case, a Parasitic Love Vine, ferrying, digesting and composting the elements, and in so doing, integrate her internal landscape with elements of the physical world. They’re an homage to the life cycle, speaking to the way in which she regards the land and plants as an avid gardener.
The exhibition includes an altar at which the public is invited to make ceremonial offerings. On Sunday, July 23, at 3pm, the altar will be a centerpiece to a special performance during Upstate Art Weekend to celebrate the exhibition. The public is invited for a ceremonial plant sit during which we will engage with a single medicinal plant on multiple levels: we'll sit with the plants, grown by Horvath, learn about their medicine from herbalist and curator, Lindsay Comstock, and journey to their spirit with Bellamy.
A concurrent exhibition, Three Cats, features the paintings of Bellamy, Horvath, and Tom Pappas and is on view at Diamond Hollow Books in Andes.
SUSIE BELLAMY (b. 1973, Edison, New Jersey) is a visual artist, energy healer and Shamanic Reiki Master Teacher. Susie lived and worked in New York City for over two decades and now resides in Bovina, NY. Her private practice, Diamond Hollow Healing, is located in Andes, New York. Susie is also the author and creator of Dream Dust Shamanic Tarot, published in 2016, which is based on a series of her abstract paintings.
SHARON HORVATH grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and moved to NYC when she was 17, receiving a BFA from the Cooper Union and a MFA from Tyler School of Art. She lived abroad in Rome and Amsterdam and currently lives and works in Queens, NewYork and Andes/Catskills. Horvath is Professor and Chair of Art in Painting and Drawing at Purchase College, SUNY and was inducted into the National Academy Museum in 2016. Horvath received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to India for 2013-14.Other distinctions include a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Anonymous was a Woman award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Painting, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, a Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum, a Mid- Atlantic NEA Regional Fellowship, an Elizabeth Foundation Grant for Painting. Horvath exhibits with Lori Bookstein Projects, NY, Victoria Munroe Fine Art, NY Pierogi Gallery, NY, and The Drawing Room.
