LIVINGSTON MANOR — Catskill Art Space is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work from Lenore Malen and Debra Pearlman, Samantha Modder, and Amy Yoes. The exhibitions will be on view in the ground floor galleries of Catskill Art Space, 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, NY, from May 4 through June 22. Exhibition hours are Friday and Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm, and Sunday, 11 am – 3 pm. 

Lenore Malen and Debra Pearlman will present a joint exhibition of their photographic work in the Eastern Gallery on the ground floor. The two artists have been deeply engaged in each other’s work for several years and share an interest in spontaneous role-playing and play-acting. Additionally, they both explore a quasi-realistic style in painting and photography that skirts around expressionism. For both artists, the photographic image is the source material. In both bodies of work, tension, rules, teasing, order and violence prevail. The interactions of adults in Malen’s images and children in those of Pearlman’s illuminate the complexities of conflicts and provisional, always fragile, resolutions in our current culture. 

Lenore Malen’s photographs are absurdist, sometimes violent, and comedic. Lenore Malen’s images from The New Society For Universal Harmony were initially staged in her studio from 2000 to 2003. Lost in an archive, they were recently rediscovered and scanned for the first time in 2021; they have never been exhibited. These images represent her creation of a new social world modeled after La Societe d’harmonie universelle, a utopian society founded immediately before the French Revolution by the German hypnotist-philosopher Franz Mesmer. For her project, Malen photographed performance events in N.Y.C., Prague, and Paris, which she staged with ritual objects and improvisations. These sometimes violent images implicate the utopian/dystopian visions of the millennial era. 

Debra Pearlman will exhibit sculptural photographic works of young bodies in motion, whether leaping, falling, pushing, or jumping. Suspended from the ceiling, the dynamic bodies become metaphors for aspiration and struggle. Pearlman captures the chance and public demonstrations of children in play through her street photography practice. Children as the subject allow for unselfconscious expressions of movement, which is difficult to achieve with adult subjects. She alters the photographic form through material exploration, altering meaning, context, scale, and dimensionality. In her newest body of work, she applies dye sublimation and U.V. photographic prints on surfaces of aluminum and di-bond that are then bent. This manipulation creates relief and three-dimensional forms floating in space, with minor changes of gesture con, text, and meaning, defying spatial experience.

Samantha Modder will install a series of site-specific, digitally-printed murals on adhesive paper from her recent body of work exploring a subjective Black woman’s fairytale that processes interlocking structures of oppression. The narrative installations are made of digitally manipulated ballpoint pen drawings that follow a Black woman in her nightdress and striped socks in a world of only her and her duplicates. Through flying hairballs, commoditized socks, and characters like the ever-present “Source of All Hair,” and her materially minded counterpart, the “Wearer of All Socks,” the work serves as an allegory for our contemporary condition, confronting questions of power, exploitation, and resistance. The work is positioned in the speculative practice of the Black imaginary—a centering of Black dreams and fantasies to create alternate spaces of both comfort and confrontation. Black hair is a powerful protagonist, pushing the narrative forward in soft curls and defiant shapes. 

Amy Yoes will create a site-specific installation, using strategies she used in her current exhibition, Hot Corners, at MassMoCA. Sculpture, paintings, works on paper, and photographs co-exist in spaces, encouraging visitors to engage with the work. She will show new work with several sculptural vitrines of vibrant colors, repetitive design motifs, and exuberant materiality that explore the language of ornament and pattern throughout history and the specificity of spaces. The artist’s multi-faceted practice employs installation, photography, video, painting, and sculpture, often within the same project. It merges in environments and images that suggest the creation of a particular universe with its logic, codes and syntax.