Exhibition of work by Robin Crookall, Lizzie Scott, David Storey, and Barbara Weissberger
Livingston Manor, NY—Catskill Art Space (CAS) will present an exhibition of work by Robin Crookall, Lizzie Scott, David Storey, and Barbara Weissberger. The exhibition opens on Saturday, November 2, with an artist talk from 3 to 4 p.m., followed by a reception from 4 to 5 p.m.; it remains on view through December 29.
Robin Crookall's work seamlessly blends sculpture and photography, using architectural models that she photographs and prints to craft scenes straddling fact and illusion. These images depict environments that are at once familiar yet mundane, inviting viewers to question their notions of reality, memory, and place. The subtlety of Crookall's illusion is akin to sleight of hand rather than grand spectacle, as they aim to disorient space, time, and scale with a nuanced approach to visual deception. By creating scenes that could be either real places or carefully crafted scale models, Crookall draws the viewer into an experience of subtle disorientation, prompting them to see beyond the surface and question their perception of the world around them.
Artist and curator Shirley Irons has curated an exhibition from Lizzie Scott and Barbara Weissberger, 
two mid-career artists who expand the fabric of painting and push it into sculpture, photography, and performance. Both have worked and/or performed with choreographers and dancers, using their work as costume and prop, but the concentration of their work is as painting, flat on a wall. Scott is a colorist, using eccentric materials sewn into giant bat-like shapes (The Drifters) that can perform on a wall, on a chair, on the floor, and live with fresh studies in Flashe and quick "rounds" that live primarily on the floor. Her cat drawings, not included here, are to die for. The work is formal, on the edge of elegance, intense, and always unpredictable.
Where Scott uses color, Weissberger uses narrative. Her work comes out of soft sculpture, moving toward an unorthodox idea of quilting. She uses photography as an imprint on often luxurious fabric, draping and collaging unlikely combinations of material, to talk about optimism and futility, somewhat in the vein of Samuel Beckett. Her daily sculptures are always on the verge of collapse, but the camera keeps them stable, a way of recording time and giving hope for a continuing future. "Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again."
David Storey creates paintings that engage the fluidly permeable boundaries between image and abstraction. Invention, configuration, clarity, and the potential energy of color are essential elements that shape each painting, making it uniquely about itself. Viewing and engaging with a painting is virtually a contract for Storey. Once a viewer's terms are agreed upon, all separations dissolve. The physical laws of here and now become void, and opposites merge. His paintings transport viewers to another mysterious world within their own, collapsing sameness and difference into a universal visual moment.
About the Artists
Robin Crookall is a New York-based artist working in sculpture and photography. In 2024, Crookall received a fellowship at Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, NY, and a residency at Light Work in Syracuse, NY. Also, in 2024, Crookall presented a solo exhibition at Morris Adjmi Architects in N.Y. She is a 2021 finalist in The Print Centers, 95th Annual International Competition. In April 2021, she had a solo exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. In the fall of 2020, she completed a residency and solo exhibition at the Penumbra Foundation in New York City. Crookall is a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in photography from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Crookall has participated in exhibitions at Field Projects in New York, Candela Gallery in Virginia, Art Basel in Miami, Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Gallery 4Culture in Seattle, and Friesen Gallery in Seattle. Publications featuring her work include Art Dialogues (2023), Arts in Square (2022), Musée Magazine (2021), Vast Magazine (2021), Real Art Ways Zine (2021), Indiefoto (2016), and The Seattle Times (2012).
Shirley Irons is an artist and educator whose curatorial projects include "Exurbia" and "The Way We Live Now" at Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles, Alien Bodies at SUNY Purchase and S.V.A., NY, and most recently an online exhibit, "The Fall," for Critical Practices, Inc. (https://www.criticalpractices.org/cpi-vrp ), where she was on the curatorial committee with Sara Reisman and Aliza Shvartz.
Lizzie Scott has been working at the intersections of textiles, painting, and sculpture for over 20 years, exhibiting work throughout the U.S. and Europe. Lizzie received her M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and her B.A. from Brown University and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her work has appeared in solo, two-person, and group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and Europe, including at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery (N.Y.C.), Zurcher Studio (N.Y.C.), Rachel Uffner Gallery (N.Y.C.), Kate MacGarry Gallery (London), John Tevis Gallery (Paris), The Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Jersey City Museum, The University of Dallas (TX), The Ohio University Art Gallery, (O.H.), and Bennington College (V.T.). 2009-2016, Lizzie ran The Total Styrene Experience, a roving performance laboratory. Her work has been featured and reviewed in numerous publications, including Artforum and The New York Times. Scott has been a MacDowell Colony fellow and a RNew York Foundation for the Arts sponsored artist. Her work is in collections that include the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the RISD Museum.
David Storey lives and works in New York, creating paintings, drawings, and prints that compound and condense the interaction between image and abstraction. His work is included in MoMA and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts collections. Fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, the N.E.A., and residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Public art projects include fourteen mosaic murals for the M.T.A. N Line subway station in Brooklyn (2019) and four murals painted on stucco walls for Ralph Pucci International in Los Angeles (2018-2020).
Barbara Weissberger stages photographs and works with textiles to consider bodies, objects, the weird, and the everyday. A Guggenheim Fellowship has supported Weissberger's work and numerous artist residencies in the U.S. and abroad, including Yaddo, MacDowell, Camargo, and Bogliasco. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as Silver Eye, PS1/MoMA, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, The Drawing Center, The Mattress Factory, A.D.A. Gallery, and The Missoula Art Museum. Her work has been written about in journals, including Femme Art Review and The Heavy Collective. She received an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. She was born in New Jersey and lived in San Francisco and New York before moving to Pittsburgh, where she is currently based.
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: November 2
Address: Catskill Art Space, 48 Main St. Livingston Manor, NY 12758
Opening: Saturday, November 2. Artist talk 3-4pm, Reception 4-5pm
Exhibition on-view: November 2 – December 29, 2024
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
