Ecotones and Transition Zones at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz

One view of the gallery with Michael Asbill's Practice Vessel in the center.
Ecotones and Transition Zones opened on Saturday at the Dorsky Museum in New Paltz. It's an enjoyable show with work in a wide range of media. The show manifests the artists' relationships to the environment - environments of all sorts. It's a call and response of an elemental kind; the artist brushing up against his or her own setting. The implications of which circle back into a broader environmentalist statement, but not didactically so, and the benefit here is that any statements here are personal and exploratory.


I neglected to get the information on the artist hanging from the ceiling playing a saw.
Ryan Roa and Darren Jones presented documentation in the form of a website and a brochure of an expedition the duo made along the Delaware and Hudson Canal. The website (http://www.jonesandroaexpedition.net/) is viewable in the gallery via a computer terminal.

Robert Capozzi is exhibiting photographic works that appear as sequences of film frames. He is additionally represented in documentation of a broader collaborative project called Field Notes: States of Mind. For Field Notes: States of Mind, Capozzi, with Laura Moriarty, Dylan McManus, Jill Parisi and Lorrie Fredetted embarked on a temporal and spatial exquisite corpse. The group rented a studio at the Barrett Art Center in Poughkeepsie. Each artist spent a week in the space creating an installation, then deinstalling that installation, leaving one element in the space that would the next artist would have to respond to as he/she moved in to create a new installation. The work was orignally executed to be included in the Graphica Creativa 09, a triennial exhibit of print media in Finland. Here at the Dorsky, the project is traced via a video, photographic documentation and a book. Capozzi's blog features some details of the project.
The Field Notes project is the highlight of the show for me conceptually, although there is a lot of strong work.


The photographic documentation of Field Notes: States of Mind - a collaborative project by Bob Capozzi, Lorrie Fredette, Dylan McManus, Laura Moriarty and Jill Parisi.
Conscience, 2008 by Jill Reynolds.

Heather Hutchison's plywood and plexi boxes. The work on the left is No Wind, No Waves, 2006. I didn't catch the title of the diptych on the right.





Simon Draper's interactive Habitat kiosk.Dar Williams will be performing a benefit concert with Nick Panasevich for ecoartspace and the Habitat for Artists project at the McKenna Theater in New Paltz. The McKenna Theater is located on the SUNY New Paltz Campus. The concert takes place on Sat, May 27, 2009 at 7 pm. Tix are $25.oo.


Ryan Roa's No Cares, Many Worries includes trash can palms with a trash bag hammock and monitor of a sunset/colorfield image.




Wayne Montecalvo's video installation TRUCKS, 2008.

A portion of the works by Itty Neuhaus
Franc Palaia's Lead Lot and Chromium.


Emily Putoff uses used motor oil an glass beads to create the imagery in her Twilight 2007-2009
Outside the museum, some scultpure students' art carts or, as the students have named them, clusterfucks or clusterf*cks.