LIVINGSTON MANOR- Catskill Art Space is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work from Nancy Davidson and Matt Nolen. The exhibition will be on view in the ground floor galleries of Catskill Art Space, 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, NY, from October 21, 2023, through November 25, 2023. Exhibition hours are Friday and Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Sunday 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The two divergent sculptural presentations explore presentations of self, personhood and society in their life affirming and complex works.
Through Braids, Eggs, and Legs: A Wandering, Nancy Davidson invites us into a world where the female form is both celebrated and deconstructed, where societal expectations are challenged, and where the complexity of femininity is laid bare. Nancy Davidson’s versatile practice encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, photography, and video. The exhibition features a variety of sculptures, installations, photographs, and a video. Eyeenvy a towering, one-eyed creature beckons, serving as a satirical commentary on power and control. Green Legs quiver as if on a threshold, moving slightly, keeping balance. Mini Sin invites us to consider the concept of envy under the green glow of fluorescent lights. Steppin seamlessly blends ancient Greek warrior poses with contemporary attire and dance, while Oyess immerses us in a world of illuminated wonder, where “yes” is the answer.
In Matt Nolen’s The Space Between ceramic figures occupy liminal spaces – life lived in the margins of great transition. Grappling with a cancer diagnosis in 2012, the artist was thrust into his own sense of liminality as he struggled with his mental, emotional, and physical wellness, and his mounting mortality. He explores this space through the abstracting porcelain vessels with spaces created as cells endlessly split apart versus the apparent solidity, weight and mass of the tumors that evolve from cells dividing. In the summer of 2019, during a visiting artist residency at the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem, Israel, he lived in a neighborhood “on the seam” between Jewish and Palestinian quarters. His daily observations of this charged transitional space invited further questions of the porosity of borders, and split forms that are more connected than they might appear. The works in The Space Between investigate the relationship of the micro landscape of the artist’s body to the expansiveness of the world’s social and political environment. Garniture sets, bookends, and ink blots are the vehicles to explore splitting, conjoining, seams and borders, collapse, failure and ultimately, regeneration.
