LIVINGSTON MANOR — Catskill Art Space (CAS) is pleased to present a three-person exhibition featuring Tyna Ontko, Janine Polak, and Jorge Rios, on view November 7 through December 28. The exhibition opens with an Artist Talk on Saturday, November 7 from 3–4pm in the River Gallery, followed by a reception from 4–5pm in the Main Street-facing galleries. Though distinct in medium and approach, all three artists share a preoccupation with the domestic, the material, and the overlooked — surfaces and objects that quietly encode the conditions of everyday life.

Tyna Ontko's installation TOTAL LIFE SENTIMENT constructs a domestic environment in which everyday objects — a hearth mantle, a refrigerator, a bin of dirty laundry — are staged and made strange. Among them sit carved yellow cedar sculptures that mimic recognizable objects while rendering them wholly uncanny. Drawing on her upbringing in community theater, Ontko treats each assemblage's surface as a theatrical flat, beneath which collected materials serve as place-based and class-distinct markers of identity. The work asks who inhabits the store of the human — and whether a culture can do something other than prepare a place for its own displacement.

Janine Polak works with materials that, much like our own bodies and psyches, contain concurrent strength and vulnerability. Preserving old socks, worn tank tops, and fabric destined for the rag pile into porcelain, her resulting objects call to mind the essential and often invisible labor of cleaning, mending, and tending — work disproportionately carried out by women and marginalized communities, and crucial to the functioning of society.

Jorge Rios's paintings are driven by process and rooted in the history of abstraction. Working with highly saturated water-based pigments on large canvases and paper, Rios combines gestural brushstrokes, drips, and stains with graphic elements — grids, stripes, and patterns — to explore how opposing forces such as artifice and sincerity, accident and intention, can coexist within a single picture plane.

CAS is located at 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, catskillartspace.org.