Rand Hardy, Lisa Hoke, Buzz Spector opens January 18, 2025
Livingston Manor, NY—Catskill Art Space (CAS) will present an exhibition of work by Rand Hardy, Lisa Hoke, and Buzz Spector. The exhibition opens on Saturday, January 18, with an artist talk from 3 to 4 p.m. and a reception from 4 to 5 p.m.; it remains on view through March 1. The three artists inventively use forms and color in their sculptural works and reliefs, with reverence for found objects, repurposed in novel ways.
Rand Hardy creates object sculptures that fuse form and color. He works primarily with Aqua Resin, a gypsum-based and non-toxic material, continuing the tradition of plaster sculpture that dates to ancient times and remains vibrant today. His process involves four steps: generating forms, making molds, casting the molds with color included, and combining the forms into a cohesive whole. Hardy’s approach is intuitive and somewhat irrational, emphasizing empirical perception and resonating in multiple directions.
Lisa Hoke's work operates in the slippage between discrete objects and installations, utilizing materials extracted from recycled packaging and disposable ephemera. Since 2004, she has focused on large-scale mural installations and wall reliefs emphasizing the intensely synthetic color and texture of various disposable materials. She collects, reshapes, and arranges these materials, augmenting them with acrylic felt scraps, all organized around highly keyed and saturated colors. Layers upon layers are constructed to create a patterned density, contributing to a visual field of cacophony.
The book is always more than a carrier of words and pictures. Since the late 1980s, Buzz Spector has made collages, artists' books, and installations incorporating elements from dustjackets of hardcover books. He has also written about the author's photo as a portraiture category, noting the iconographic tropes used by authors and their photographers to represent powers of thought. Spector's installation, "About the Author," includes selected collages from dustjacket elements, a trio of wall-mounted photo sculptures, and a wall-mounted arrangement of clipped author photos titled Frieze. Spector's work with the book as subject and object is an essential influence in contemporary dialogues about the relationship between viewing and reading and the fate of the print book in an increasingly digital age.
About the Artists
Rand Hardy grew up in West Virginia and later earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute before relocating to New York in 1967. He has had eleven solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows. In July 2024, his work will be on display in a public space in Lower Manhattan, where he resides and works. For seventeen years, he taught in the sculpture department at New York University and currently leads weekend workshops at the Art Students League.
Lisa Hoke received her BA from The University of NC at Greensboro and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, VA. She has been awarded a Purchase Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY; a Joan Mitchell Grant; The Edwin Austin Abbey Fellowship, NY; and an SECCA Award in the Visual Arts, NC. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Hoke's work is in many public collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, NY; and The New Orleans Museum of Art, LA.
Buzz Spector is an artist and writer whose artwork has been the focus of solo exhibitions in such museums and galleries as the Saint Louis Art
Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA, Orange County Museum of Art, and Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV. The artist's most recent museum exhibit, at the Rockford (IL) Art Museum, was "Buzz Spector: Reading Matter," 2022, a survey of his work with books. Spector's art makes frequent use of the book as subject and object and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception.
Long-term Installations
Following a major renovation and expansion, Catskill Art Space reopened in October 2022 with a long-term presentation of James Turrell’s Avaar (1982) in a custom-built gallery on the building’s second floor. A room-sized installation, Avaar is an important example of the artist’s early, wall-based “aperture” works, which function by creating two areas within a room. There is a “viewing space,” where one stands to see and experience the work, and a “sensing space,” which is an ambiguously defined area of diffused light. Avaar is one of the rare examples of Turrell’s aperture works to make use of white lighting only; no colors will be present in the installation. This work is in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, which has granted CAS a special long-term loan to exhibit the work. The presentation at CAS marks the first time the work has been shown since the 1970s, giving audiences from the Catskills and beyond the rare opportunity to experience a major Turrell work that has not been seen in nearly five decades.
On the second floor’s central landing, Sol LeWitt’s vibrant Wall Drawing #992 unfolds in three sections, each consisting of 10,000 straight lines drawn in color marker, to create a mesmerizing arrangement of primary colors. On the fourth wall, presenting LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #991, straight, arced, and organic lines will encompass the wall in black marker and pencil. The conceptual, minimalist artist conceived guidelines for his two-dimensional works to be drawn directly on the wall. Much like Turrell’s Avaar, the LeWitt works were realized for CAS’s space; in this instance, they are generously loaned by the artist’s estate. This work was overseen by a draftsperson, who determines the length and placement of the lines, and executed by five artists local to the area over nearly two weeks.
The newly realized performance space on CAS’s second floor hosts British sculptor Francis Cape’s A Gathering of Utopian Benches—an installation of meticulous copies of benches built and used by communal societies. Cape’s installations have always argued that design and craft express belief. Utopian Benches, which has toured extensively throughout the US, was built from poplar grown near Cape’s studio in Narrowsburg, NY. To be considered both as contemporary sculpture as well as furniture that visitors can actively use, the benches reference the societies who first used them, inviting visitors to utilize them for exchange, discourse, and community. The installation, which is meant to be used by visitors both for contemplation and may be used for performance seating, overlooks an expansive wall of windows onto the Willowemoc Creek.
Ellen Brooks inaugurates an intimate gallery space, framed by a partially open staircase, with Hang (2022), an installation suspending over 30 feet of scrolls of film negatives from the ceiling. The artist hangs transparencies and negatives in all formats and from clips attached to the ceiling, mimicking the practice of film photography. Hanging negatives reference the surrounding natural landscaping, evoking a cascading waterfall with coils of film collecting on the ground floor gallery.
About Catskill Art Space
Catskill Art Space (CAS) explores contemporary art practices of emerging and established artists. Through exhibitions, performances, classes, lectures, and screenings, CAS fosters creative community in the Catskills.
Established as Catskill Art Society in 1971, CAS reopened in October 2022 as Catskill Art Space following a major renovation and expansion of its multi-arts center, located in the picturesque hamlet of Livingston Manor in the Western Catskills. CAS presents a rotating slate of exhibitions, performances and other events featuring national and regional talents, alongside long-term installations of works by James Turrell, Sol LeWitt, Francis Cape, and Ellen Brooks. Learn more at catskillartspace.org.
Notes to Editor
Opening date: January 18
Address: Catskill Art Space, 48 Main St. Livingston Manor, NY 12758
Opening: Saturday, January 18. Artist talk 3-4pm, Reception 4-5pm
Exhibition on-view: January 18 – March 1, 2025
Long-term installations on view: Long-term presentation (through 2027) of James Turrell’s light installation Avaar (1982) and two site-specific wall drawings from Sol LeWitt, as well as solo presentations of well-established artists from the local area, Francis Cape (through 2027) and Ellen Brooks (through 2027).
Instagram: @catskillartspace
For media inquiries, please contact:
Sally Wright, Executive Director
646-696-1044
