The Catskill Art Space in Livingston Manor is currently exhibiting the works of Robin Crookall, Lizzie Scott, Barbara Weissberger, and David Storey. The show runs November 2 through December 29.

Robin Crookall’s photographs are primarily in black and white, and on film, as she finds it “a way to better understand the fundamentals of film and how photography works to capture light and shadow”. She loves its ability to “narrow that focus of an image to its shapes sculpted out of light”. 

Her subjects are mostly clay sculptures she creates by hand, also using wood, concrete, and cardboard to create photographic sets, focusing on the “pursuit of the uncanny”. Robin Crookall, Artist/Photographer/Sculpture can be contacted at www.robincrookall.com.

When Lizzie Scott received her MFA in 1998, she wanted to make something like paintings to describe spaces. She decided to use natural, luxurious fibers that “work with the light and have an iridescent or transparent quality. 

Using an industrial sewing machine, she combines the chosen fabric with quilt batting, crinoline netting, and heavy-duty felt, aiming to produce a “rough, done-wrong look” by keeping edges raw and seams facing outward. 

She is a colorist as well, sewing giant bat-like shapes that can perform on a wall, chair, or on the floor, always unpredictable.  She enjoys the flexibility of fabric, akin to her private drawings of her cats whose agility and irresistibility beckon her.

Barbara Weissberger’s work comes out of soft sculpture, moving towards an unorthodox idea of quilting. Her staged photographs embrace the absurd, the ridiculous, and are printed on fabric using dye sublimation, which embeds the colors and make both image and object at the same time. 

In an effort to talk about optimism and futility, and to consider bodies, objects, the weird, and the everyday, she drapes and collages unlikely combinations of material. Her sculptures are always on the verge of collapse, but the camera keeps them stable, as a way of recording time and giving hope for a continuing future.

David Storey creates paintings that engage the fluidly permeable boundaries between image and abstraction. Shaping the elements of invention, configuration, clarity, and the potential energy of color, separations dissolve and opposites merge in a void of the known physical laws of here and now. 

He states, “All my work is focused on the simultaneous elements of an implied image and abstraction coming together…as a unified juxtaposition”…”intended to bond abstract configuration with the potential for image”. He looks for “dynamic, energetic and surprising interactions of color, focusing on the degree of abstraction intertwined with the presence of image configuration”. He hopes  “always to make something I’ve never seen before”.

Shirley Irons curated the Scott and Weissberger exhibits, having known each of them for ten years. They met during the coordination of this exhibit, and their works make an interesting point/counterpoint. Herself a painter, she teaches in the Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Her two volume publication, “Composition”, MACK Books, London is a collection of her writings and paintings and her work has previously been exhibited at CAS. Scheduled in January 2025 is a solo show at Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles.

The CAS is located at 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, NY 12758; Instagram @catskillartspace. Contact Executive Director Sally Wright at sally@catskillartspace.org or (646) 696-1044.