HOT AIR
Hovey Brock was a member of the Catskill Art Society (CAS) before its rebranding as the Catskill Art Space. Originally a low-key regional arts center, the transformation began under the guidance of Executive Director Sally Wright. In October 2022, Wright inaugurated the new exhibition halls, featuring on-loan installations by Sol Lewitt and James Turrell, signaling CAS’s ambition to bring world-class arts programming to Livingston Manor. This initiative marked a significant milestone in the cultural revival sweeping the entire Catskill region, with CAS playing a pivotal role. “Since so much of my work is about the Catskills, I am thrilled to have this opportunity to show my pieces at CAS, especially in the company of fellow artists Daniella Dooling and Valerie Hegarty,” Brock says.
Hovey, tell us a bit more about yourself.
I began my art career as a straight-up abstract painter, emerging in the early noughties. The works that I was doing at the time were very subtle: layers and layers of pale washes on an absorbent ground that behaved more like paper than gessoed canvas. By the beginning of the 2010s, I began experimenting with mesh to control the painting surface and provide texture. It wasn’t until 2017 that I began my Crazy River project. I began to include words or phrases in my paintings that had an autobiographical origin. These words are rooted in the psychological toll the climate crisis began to take on me. This project began as a diary of my reaction to two successive 100-year floods in 2011 and 2012 on the West Branch of the Neversink, a river that I grew up on. That experience gave me a taste of what it feels like to live through the chaos of accelerating global warming. My Crazy River project fuses my painting practice and my writing practice. I am currently working on a series of personal essays about my time on the Neversink and my dawning climate awareness.
Tell us about the origin of this show.
The Catskill Art Space selects by committee a revolving trio of artists for its three ground-floor exhibit rooms that complement the long-term installations on the building’s second floor. I can’t say for sure what the committee had in mind when it selected my group. It seems to me we share a need to explore shifting notions about the natural world in the age of the climate crisis. That said, Dooling and Hegarty have a range of concerns beyond climate change. Dooling’s investigations have ranged through gender, materiality, and the uncanny. Hegarty’s works have engaged with institutional critique and deconstructing the art historical canon. I won’t say more about my fellow exhibitors without being able to give their practices their full due, which would involve a much longer interview.
What will the visitor see in your exhibition space?
I will be installing paintings from 2020 through 2022 and two banners from 2023. The paintings have heavily textured surfaces, an effect that I achieve with mesh and high-viscosity acrylic media. I see the mesh as a metaphor for the layers of screens we put between ourselves and the natural world: language, culture, and all the literal screens we encounter in our technology. In the example of the work at the beginning of the article, A Golden Spike for the Anthropocene, 2020, the drop-shadow effect is the result of layers of acrylic paint applied through a template. The template for each painting is a piece of mesh onto which I paint words or phrases and then use each time I put down another layer of acrylic paint. In this painting, the phrase “A Golden Spike for the Anthropocene” is no longer legible because I have used the template so many times that the words have been blotted out by the acrylic medium I push through the mesh.
In Feral Hog, 2021, you can still read the text even as the writing appears to be disintegrating. The paintings have the look of textiles, which I make as a visual pun on the “text” that I literally (pun intended) include. Each painting takes its title from the text that appears on it. Language, the medium for our species’ hyper-social traits, contributes to how we have set ourselves apart from other lifeforms on the planet. Ironically, we are now facing the possibility of going extinct, as have 99% of all previous species, because of our success. Our overpopulation and voracious appetite for resources in industrialized societies have already wiped out a lot of other complex life forms, with more facing a grim future.
I include two banners, which are an extension of my practice of painting on mesh. The banners are meant to be shown free-standing. They give me the opportunity to experiment with large-scale installations in the future.
How do you see the relationship between your activist stand and your art?
They are related but parallel pursuits. The artwork is intended to bear witness to the changes being forced on us in the climate crisis, with the aim of promoting discussion and awareness. I see art’s role in the crisis as a social glue that makes it faster and easier for like-minded people to come together and get things done. It creates context, which is important for communicating goals. Art is not a substitute for action. I belong to several organizations dedicated to dealing with the climate crisis: Catskill Mountain Keeper, an environmental advocacy group for the Catskill Region, for example. In addition, I have dedicated my time and money to preserving five-plus miles of the West Branch of the Neversink, jointly owned through a family corporation. The aim is to maintain this land and water as a refuge against the environmental degradation–erosion, invasive insects and plants, tree diseases, etc.–that threaten the ecological well-being of the Catskill forests.
Hovey Brock, Daniella Dooling, Valerie Hegarty at Catskill Art Space, March 2nd – April 27th 48 Main St, Livingston Manor, NY 12758
On April 27th, the closing day of the exhibition, there will be an Earth Day symposium with all three artists commenting on how the climate crisis figures in their practice. The panel discussion goes from 4 -5pm and includes a Q&A.