Tyna Ontko, Janine Polak, and Jorge Rios

Livingston Manor, NY — 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, 2026. 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.

About the Artists

Tyna Ontko is an artist and writer from Washington State whose practice concerns the collective activities of making space and facilitating place across physical and virtual platforms. Her work and writing have been included in Robida Magazine Vol. 12, Are.na Annual Vol. 7, and mutual realm at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Richmond, Virginia.

Janine Polak received a BA in Studio Art and Economics from the University of Virginia in 2005, and was awarded the Aunspaugh Fellowship the following year. In 2008, she earned an MFA from the Yale University School of Art, Department of Sculpture. She has had solo exhibitions at Essex Flowers, NYC; Lorimoto, Queens; Ernestine, NY; and Sardine, Brooklyn, and group exhibitions in New York, China, Australia, and Iceland.

Jorge Rios was born in Havana, Cuba in 1988. He attended the National Academy of Visual Arts San Alejandro from age 14, holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2021), and earned an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2023.

Currently on view

Elizabeth Murray, PRESENT TENSE Works on Paper

Catskill Art Space, in collaboration with the Elizabeth Murray Estate, Trisha Brown Dance Company, and Works & Process, will present a special residency devoted to PRESENT TENSE (2003), the landmark collaboration between choreographer Trisha Brown and artist Elizabeth Murray. Catskill Art Space will present a selection of Elizabeth Murray’s works on paper that served as studies for the backdrop she created for PRESENT TENSE. The exhibition is on view in the second-floor River Gallery, October 3 through December 27, 2026, offering audiences a rare opportunity to encounter Murray’s visual thinking alongside the choreography it helped shape.

The presentation illuminates the collaborative nature of PRESENT TENSE: Murray’s drawings and studies reveal the development of the forms that ultimately occupied the stage, while the live rehearsal and performance allow those forms to be understood in relation to Brown’s constantly shifting bodies and spatial structures. Together, the exhibition and residency offer a multidimensional portrait of two artists whose practices were grounded in movement, experimentation, scale, and an instinctive refusal of conventional boundaries between disciplines.

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 activates 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 7, 2026

Address: Catskill Art Space, 48 Main St. Livingston Manor, NY 12758
Opening: Saturday, November 7. Artists talk 3-4pm, Reception 4-5pm

Exhibition on-view: November 7 – December 26, 2026

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).