The art exhibit “Front of House” opened December 2 at The Catskill Art Space  (CAS) in Livingston Manor. A collaboration of three artists who have known each other since waitressing at a NYC Cajun restaurant, it depicts an interaction with materials in a manner that challenges our previous definitions of painting, sculpture, and photography. Just as culinary ingredients are combined and served, the artists are the chefs who bring an experience to consume and enjoy.

By an interruption of the creative process to interact with viewers, the chefs/artists beckon the public to complete what they make, becoming part of the process. Delving into areas of agency, cognition, phenomenology, and authorship, the exhibit offers more than a feast for the senses.

Joy Episalla is a New York based interdisciplinary artist interested in transgressing and challenging photographic fixity. Her work repositions photography and the moving image into the territory of sculpture. The dynamics of transformation, multiplicity, and hybridity activate the work and stem from their occupation in the queer feminist position.

Her art has evolved over decades in the manipulation of photographic images through photogram processes. It moves away from representation, acknowledging black and silver gelatin paper as an object itself.

She was introduced to photography and printmaking in high school, attended art school, and learns through interaction with other NYC artists. She can be reached at jepisalla@gmail.com;  social media @jepisalla; and www.joyepisalla.com. ph: (917) 603-1288.

Michele Araujo is a Brooklyn, NY, painter whose paintings function within a contradiction. She strives to interrupt the beauty developed by paint, color, and gesture with an array of external materials, such as collages of photos, contact paper, and wallpaper. The result suggests a resistance to explicit interpretations and a love for possibility.

Evolving from abstract painting to developing images through collage, she is inspired by “living in an indecipherable world”. Email: araujmich@gmail.com.

Carrie Yamaoka is a NY- based visual artist who works across painting, photography and sculpture. She is interested in the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine outcomes; topography of surfaces; processes; and the tactility of bare, visible objects. The viewer is addressed with the intersection in time between the recording of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture that emerges in fleeting and unstable states of transformation.

She is inspired by intriguing work of other artists; light falling on objects/rooms/people/ landscapes and the “sense that in some small way I am remaking the world in my work.”

She has shifted from “deterministic” to “more open-ended” and “destruction as a creative and transformational dynamic.” She has been involved with photography, writing experimental music and learning from other artists in NYC during the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Reach her at carrie.yamaoka@gmail.com and www.carrieyamaoka.com.

The exhibit runs until December 30, 2023; open Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. -5 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. - 3 p.m. CAS is located at 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor. Ph: (646) 696-1044; Instagram:@catskillartspace.