the phoenix

COLLAGE/UNCOLLAGE

AUGUST 2ND-NOVEMBER 21ST

the hesterly black at WATERBURY STUDIOS

ERIKA LAWLOR SCHMIDT

SEPTEMBER 6TH-december 20th

flora

Co-curated by TR Risk and Joseph Pensak

featuring new work by Annemarie Buckley, Kristy Hughes, Frankie Gardiner, Milton Rosa-Ortiz, Linden Eller, Axel Stohlberg, Kelsey Telek, Alison Scileppi and TR Risk

curator’s statement

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. —Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard’s seminal work of non-fiction, for which she was honored with the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, is a sustained act of seeing nature’s “lesser cataclysms”—liminal breakthroughs that send light shivering up our spine. Dillard’s habitat of interest when she wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was the Blue Ridge range of the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, and it was there she delved intensely into the flora and fauna of the area around Tinker Creek. “Flora” has two definitions based on context: most commonly, flora references all of the plant life in a given region. This is usually compared to the fauna (animal life), and funga (fungi) that all share space together and interconnect. When capitalized, Flora means the exhaustive documentation (with scientific names) of each and every plant species in a defined area. Keep all this in mind as you saunter through FLORA—these nine artists channel the ineffable spine shiver of all these layers of meaning with a weighty lightness borne of attention-giving.

ana koehler: revealed/revered

New Works on Paper

may 3rd-july 31st, 2024

curator’s statement

Thankfully body anxiety is no longer a topic for kid gloves and hushed, judgy tones. Amidst the chaos and intractable problems of our world, one of the truly progressive cultural insights of the past decade is just how commonplace (read: intrinsically human) our disordered thinking about bodies truly is. We know this is true from the celebrities we worship—our perfect heroes in reality see all their tiny flaws and invest fortunes on tweaking them, in part so that we will continue our worship of their all too doctored perfection. Body positivity, along with all the other positivities (sex, gender, etc) has been a sword in the side of the perfection industry, and many advertisers have cried uncle and shifted gears, featuring “real” people in their campaigns, touting their awakened conscience. Whether or not this pricked conscience is real or simply another manufactured industry response to sell the same product, it is an objectively lovely development that more and more we are seeing real human beings (ourselves) reflected back to us and represented as beautiful.

Ana Koehler’s work enters this conversation with an intoxicating combination of vulnerability, boldness, philosophical insight and courage. Her pinks and reds strike the eye first, as the discomfiting connection with blood, guts, and flayed flesh is unavoidable. The same way Francis Bacon’s work shocks us into seeing, Koehler’s colors hit the eye as an ironic banquet of body horror. Meeting us in this vulnerable color smackdown is the gaze of her subject, looking back at us, sometimes over the shoulder, inviting us through the red terror with sometimes beckoning, sometimes childlike eyes. This creates another layer to process—we must sit with our own journey through bloody adolescence, with its awkward and unavoidable embodied (and so often bottled) desires, fears and needs. Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” is referenced in one of the works: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Here is the key and the purpose of vulnerability—after all, vulnerability without wisdom, without agency, is the definition of exploitation. We allow our bodies to love what they love only when we are allowed to first love our bodies. As RuPaul sagely tells us at the end of every “Drag Race” episode: “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an amen?”

—Joseph Pensak

artist statement

Turning 40 awakened a transformation in me; a potent urge for self-discovery that is tied deeply to a personal exploration of womanhood. "Revealed/Revered" is the visual articulation of this journey. My process is cutting up past drawings and paintings, then re-configuring them into a new piece of art — like an intuitive excavation unearthing the complexities within, I layer paper, paint, pen, marker, and glue—each element adding depth to my discovery. The figures I build transcend mere representation; they are vibrant expressions of contrasting mediums mirroring the constant dance between structure and flow that our identities embody. These figures blur and blend, a visual tapestry of transformation. "Revealed/Revered" delves into the ongoing process of self-discovery. It embraces the emotional depth, the vibrant experiences, and the intricacies between internal and external demands that have shaped my self-perception. Art becomes a tool for deconstruction and reconstruction, revealing the complexities of the Self to be held in reverence. The figures themselves are layered and fluid, existing in a state of perpetual transition. They represent the act of disassembling the puzzle pieces of my life, throwing them into the air, and reconfiguring them all back together. They are a testament to the beautiful messiness of becoming, of leaving behind what no longer serves, a reflection of the impermanent and the ever-evolving nature of Self.

warp & weft

january 5th-march 29th, 2024

JASMINE PARSIA

EMMA WARREN

HANNAH MORRIS

ELISE WHITTEMORE

KAREN CYGNAROWICZ

CARLEEN ZIMBALATTI

RACHEL LAUNDON

The Phoenix, 5 Stowe Street, Waterbury, Vt

Opening reception was Friday, January 5th, 2024.

Curator’s Statement

It seems clear as a society we are in an “unweaving” era. Institutions that once held solid ground and social sway are being torn apart, for good or ill. We increasingly live atomized and parallel lives, managing our bubble to such an extent that it sometimes feels as though we are living in an entirely different reality from our next door neighbors. Families are taking sides, shunning and “bye girl-ing” are common currency in our relationships and more and more nothing is commonplace, culturally speaking. Is there nothing left to do but throw up our hands, dig in and hermetically seal our boundaries, teams and tribes to ride this thing out til the world burns? History tells us that artists can show us the way, if we’ll take time to pause, reflect and listen. These seven artists, all working in the well-won top of their game, visually re-weave us. Notice the dialogue in all these pieces, in the warp (vertical) and weft (horizontal) of their lines, that conflict—the meeting of difference—must not always result in destruction and undoing. Conflict is, in fact, the only way to deeper intimacy across boundary lines; avoidance as a social strategy never works. However, when an encounter with difference is approached with wonder, awe, humility and a spirit of listening, we join the courageous act of re-weaving society back to wholeness. Jasmine Parsia’s paper-weaving, Elise Whittemore’s shape-shifting, Hannah Morris’ people-gathering, Rachel Laundon’s spirit-latticing, Emma Warren’s wool-weaving, Karen Cygnarowicz’s river-founting and Carleen Zimbalatti’s color-balancing all contribute their own thread to the fabric, which grows stronger with every loop.

—Joseph Pensak, Curator

athena tasiopoulos: saunter

february 2nd-april 26th, 2024

The Hesterly Black at Waterbury Studios, 7 Stowe Street, Waterbury, Vt

Curator’s Statement

The environmentalist John Muir, whose life vocation as a writer and activist called us back to an intimate and regular connection with our habitat—our physical, natural environment—disdained the word “hike” in favor of the more evocative “saunter”:

in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, 'A la sainte terre', 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.

Athena Tasiopoulos’ encaustic pictures on wood panel, paper, and hunks of found wood provide us with a map for sacred walks through imagined ancient/modern landscapes. Her process begins with carefully chosen colored paper collaged over the surface of her chosen canvas. These colors are lusciously muted by the encaustic process that follows (the Greek word enkaustikos means “to heat or burn in”), in which she employs a heating apparatus to melt down a combination of natural bees wax and dammar resin (crystallized tree sap). The Greek painter Pausius (early 4th century A.D.) is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the method of encaustic painting, and one can find uses of encaustic wax on Egyptian burial masks. Athena’s fusing of this ancient method with her modern approach to form gives her work a timeless and sublime richness. Let your own imagination and emotions rise as you enter and amble through the work. And as you leave, remember you are standing on sacred ground, wherever you are. 

—Joseph Pensak

steve budington: call shore

OCTOBER 6TH-DECEMBER 29TH, 2023

The Hesterly Black (upstairs gallery at Waterbury Studios above The Phoenix in Waterbury, Vt)

Opening reception was Friday, October 6th, 2023.

Curator’s Statement

“I want all of the rich historical colorations to be manifest in talking about our finitude.” The philosopher Cornel West speaks these words in the back of a taxi cab being driven around Manhattan for Astra Taylor’s “philosophy-in-the-street” documentary Examined Life. As the yellow checkered cab weaves it way past a U-Haul truck unloading yet to be clothed mannequins for a window display, West goes on to distinguish between the too abstract concept of “death” favored by Martin Heidegger in favor of John Donne’s “corpses.” “That’s what Bluesmen do. That’s what Jazz men do. They start with catastrophe, the wreckage of history, the funk of life!” West intones, jaw up, eyes smiling-wide, perched erect on the edge of the back seat.

Steve Budington’s paintings sit similarly on the wall: angular, elbows-out shapes and colors draw and discomfit the eye, while the no less stunning folds of nautical warning flags—a visual theme in most of these works—hold and hide the peril lurking here; our finitude and the catastrophe inherent in our late modern verge-of-apocalypse-feeling world. But to focus only on the peril is to miss the hope that equally rears its head here—these works, our land, the thrill of existing at all, all of it is so goddamned beautiful. And so we are left to wonder alongside these paintings, without answers, warning flag in hand, vigilantly searching the wild horizon for a bobbing light coming from the shore. 

—Joseph Pensak

Artist Statement

I make work in and about landscapes. Maritime signal flags in recent paintings of mine indicate messages like “man overboard,” “call shore,” or “I am trying to communicate with you.” These flags, resembling twentieth-century abstractions in primary colors, were used to communicate emergency, uncertainty at sea, or navigational intention. Like wind maps, elevation charts, and other informational signage, they suggest ongoing or predictive experiences in the natural world, including its beauty and precarity.

My work emphasizes the physical, symbolic, and optical qualities of paintings; stacked canvases in relief, framing elements, window-like forms, cultural and experiential use of color, signage, and changes in facture and surface. These forms constitute an abstract aesthetic framework that embodies analogs to contemporary visual communication; what is physically real and what is illusion? What reveals and what obscures? What’s fixed and what’s in flux? I work to locate an experience of the natural world within these representational and symbolic systems. 

Bio

STEVE BUDINGTON received an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art and a BFA in painting and art history from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with additional studies at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. Budington has shared his work nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Vienna, Austria, at the ClubClub Wien; in New York, at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Fordham University, and Exit Art; San Francisco, at the Mirus Gallery; Los Angeles, at Whittier College; and in Italy, at the Fondazione Ambrosetti Arte Contemporanea. Closer to his Vermont home the artist has shared work at the Hall Art Foundation in Reading Vermont, the BCA Center, and the Phoenix Gallery in Waterbury. Budington received a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant in 2019-20 and has been awarded residencies at the Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg, Austria, the Monhegan Island Artist in Residence, in Maine, and a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. The artist has taught as an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, The Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, and currently at the University of Vermont, where he is Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing. Outside of his teaching and studio work, Budington creates improvised music with a Middlebury-based collective, volunteers as an extension master gardener, and designs landscapes and gardens. The artist lives with his family in Shelburne, Vermont.   

TRYSTAN BATES: THE STARLING SYMPHONY

september 8th-november 17th, 2023

Opening reception was Friday, September 8th, 2023

About the artist

Trystan Bates is a graduate of Parsons University and the Gerrit Rietveld Acadamie in Amsterdam NL. Following his education, Trystan worked for several years in New York City as an Editorial Illustrator before accepting a position at Felissimo Design House and Museum in NY where he was the Curator and General Manager of the four floor exhibition space. In the early 2000’s Trystan relocated to Buenos Aires where he focused on the development of his studio practice. His work was included in numerous publications, crossover collaborations with large companies such as Coca Cola, Adidas and streetwear brand PURO and in international exhibitions throughout South America, the United States, Australia and Europe. 

While in Buenos Aires Trystan worked towards building opportunities for local artists and the creative community who were struggling to recover following a national economic collapse. Through these efforts he founded a large artist collective called Honeycomb Arts. Honeycomb became a local incubator for creativity and enabled him to manage and grow the careers of highly talented artists, build cultural bridges between Latin America, Europe and the US and create accessible programming for the local community. 

In 2008 Trystan opened Honeycomb Showroom in Buenos Aires where he curated and presented exhibitions of highly acclaimed young artists hailing from Argentina and Latin America. He built a residency program that took groups of artists into rural locations, such as the comarca of Guna Yala to learn from ancient and indigenous culture. He also built residencies that would bring American artists to Buenos Aires to collaborate with local creators and present their work for the first time in Latin America. In 2013 Honeycomb expanded into Honeycomb Gallery. 

With increased space came increased potential and the ability to expand his artist stable to include more artists from abroad. The space allowed Trystan to connect people from across the world and encourage creative bonds while also programming more activities, artist lectures, studio visits, workshops and collaborations in which the local community could become directly involved with the artists whom were showcased. 

In 2018 Trystan returned to the United States and settled in Vermont. He has over the past few years been focused on continuing to develop his studio practice. He is busy creating work for upcoming exhibitions, acting as collections manager at the Londonderry Arts and Historic Society and running Double Vision Editions, A small bespoke art publishing / printing company that works with artists to print exciting and accessible collections. 

Trystan currently lives and works in Southern Vermont.

EXHIBITION CONCEPT 

The Starling is a most curious creature. The small bird is part collector and part madcap composer. With a highly developed echoic memory, the Starling spends its day exploring its environment and taking sonic snapshots of sounds it encounters. It then takes these snippets and combines it into a birdsong that is truly unique and magical. Each Starlings song is completely their own and is an audial record of their entire life. Often times the result is an eclectic mash up where one can note in addition to other birds signature songs, human words, electronic sounds, musical samples, or car alarms.

We as humans are very much like the Starling. We travel through our lives encountering other people, facing challenges, enjoying beautiful moments, learning and evolving. We take mental notes of the things that are of personal significance and carry those memories with us. The echos of these experiences are crucial to our growth and development. They help us develop mentally and emotionally, inform us of our likes and dislikes, teach us how to build relationships and define our individual personalities. Our memories, and that what we hold on to is a major part of what makes us special. 

"The Starling Symphony" is inspired by the behavior and creativity of the Starling, it is an abstract examination of the way in which we process, assimilate and store information. The show is presented in five movements: "Icons". "Jawbreakers". "Crystallization" "Convergence", and "Birdsong". Each of these features a series that focuses on a different aspect of this process and invites viewers to consider how they gather, transform and utilize information collected from their environments and experiences.

THE MOVEMENTS

Movement 01 / ICONS

A series of collages that showcase individual elements in a simplified, raw form. Basic shapes that become the basis for all the other work in the exhibit are highlighted and honored in this group. To the artist, the shapes which are referred to as icons have individual meanings and symbolic significance to singular experiences, moments or emotions.

Movement 02 / JAWBREAKERS

A group of monotone, layered, papercut sculptures where viewers can see the information presented in Movement 01 in another context. Depth, dimension and obstruction are the theme of this work. The pieces are representative of moments in which the full value of an experience is not seen upfront or at first glance. Instead, one must dig to find the wisdom and meaning.

Movement 03 / CRYSTALLIZATION

Atriptych of acrylic sculptures. These pieces like those in Movement 02 are also layered, but in this case they are transluscent thus allowing one to see through the entire piece at first glance without any obstruction. The translucent layers work together, changing the color values of overlapping areas while also reflecting a two dimensional rendering of the composition on the wall surface. Pieces in this series represent moments in which we find clarity and enlightenment. They are symbolic of instances where all of the pieces we have gathered fit together perfectly with a clear purpose.

Movement 04 / CONVERGENCE

A series of mixed media collages and wooden assemblages. Movement 04 is the most active of the exhibition. Artwork is non symmetrical and full of implied motion with some pieces falling into place seamlessly and others still struggling to find their spot. This group of work is symbolic of the final moments of the assimilation of information, where we have just discarded that which is not useful and are incorporating that what is into our final "song"

Movement 05 / BIRDSONG

A suite of five hand pulled prints that incorporate the themes of the other four movements and play with the idea of repetition and rhythm. The prints are available in a limited edition of 25 copies.

ART IS CANDY | June 23rd-August 18th, 2023

WILL PATLOVE

STEVE BUDINGTON

ATHENA TASIOPOULOS

WILL GEBHARD

FRANK TAMASI

Opening reception for ART IS CANDY at The Phoenix was on Friday, June 23rd, 5-8pm. This reception coincided with the first “Music In the Alley” concert of the summer, Freeway Clyde [Michael Chorney], presented by TURNmusic, 6-9pm.

Curator’s Statement

ART IS CANDY for the child within us. It’s just that some candy is licorice, which is objectively horrible, as everyone with good sense knows. Sometimes though, life is objectively horrible, and all candy can’t be Pop Rocks. The sourness that puckers the lips and turns the face inside out, if you stick with it, can take you on quite a ride and open you up to a few new things if you let it (sour people can sometimes do the same). We’re all terrible wonders/wonderful terrors anyway—the best of us have fatal flaws and the worst of us can’t avoid stumbling into some tenderness. Gorgeous art, challenging art, sour art, even licorice art are all desperately needed for our souls to have a shot at making it through this sometimes terrible, sometimes wonderful human experience. And art is for everyone, it’s just that somewhere down the line we forgot that kid inside us and started saying ignorant things like “my kid could draw that.” Yes your kid could draw that, if you would let them. 

This group show brings together five artists using color, line, and architectural elements to bend and stretch the canvas (and the viewer with it) toward an otherness of dimensionality through a delightful play with forms. Cutouts are common in these pieces, and we are called to wander where the colors are and are not. In each picture there are rooms to ruminate in, doors to open, envelopes to lick shut, buttons to press, and portals to jump through or ponder (we’re using our imaginations, not our fingers or tongues, but the tactile desire these paintings elicit is real). There are balances and symmetries, but also slants, tilts, tripwires and trapdoors. Notice the emotions that the colors surface and sit with them—there is transcendent warm joy here, cold unease, and wild leaping abandon. Feel how the shapes push out and off the wall and seem to float in their own little worlds. If art is candy for the child within, these artists invite us to taste and imagine another world of possibilities.

-Joseph Pensak

the artists of ART IS CANDY

Will Patlove @willpatlove.art

Steve Budington @stevebudingtonstudio

Athena Tasiopoulos @athenapetra

Will Gebhard @will_gebhard

Frank Tamasi @franktpsyche

WATERBURY STUDIOS PRESENTS

CYANOTYPICAL: BLUEPRINT PORTRAITS BENJAMIN ALESHIRE

June 16th-August 17th, 2023

opening reception with open studios

Friday, June 16th, 2023, 5-8pm

Poetry reading by Benjamin Aleshire and Skye Jackson, 7pm at the receptioN

Artist talk with Benjamin Aleshire

June 23rd, 7pm

Image Credit: This portrait of the artist and activist Molly Crabapple in her studio in Brooklyn was shot this April on medium format 120 film and printed in the sunlight from enlarged negatives as cyanotypes, at 24x24", onto cotton fabric.

To create these striking photographs, Benjamin employs the same basic chemistry formula that was invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel, which was used primarily to create architectural blueprints. An emulsion of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, when mixed together, becomes sensitive to ultraviolet light. After exposure in sunlight, the prints are washed in water, leaving only the ferric ferrocyanide (Prussian Blue pigment) behind.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK AT:

WWW.CYANOPORTRAITURE.COM

IG @BENJAMIN_ALESHIRE

Viewings by appointment (email us) and open during events at The Phoenix Gallery & Music Hall (downstairs)

WATERBURY STUDIOS PRESENTS

SIDE BY SIDE

COLLABORATIVE PRINTS

GREGG BLASDEL AND JENNIFER KOCH

MARCH 24TH-APRIL 1ST, 2023

Opening reception was Friday, March 24th, 2023