Landscape Deconstructed at the Hammond: Linda Stillman

Part 1: Linda Stillman – Interview with Jennifer McGregor

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Linda Stillman, Daily Skies: 2020, February 15, 2020 focus, 2021, archival pigment print on paper, 19 x 13 inches

Landscape Deconstructed: Mimi Czajka Graminski and Linda Stillman is a virtual exhibition on view at the Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden website until June 2022. It is curated by Bibiana Huang Matheis. The opening on September 11, 2021, included a virtual conversation with Mimi Czajka Graminski and Linda Stillman moderated by Jennifer McGregor which has been distilled and reformatted for individual interviews with each artist.

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Ellen Kozak – Vigil

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Gallery View. Photo courtesy of David Richard Gallery

Vigil, Ellen Kozak’s first solo painting exhibition with David Richard Gallery, featured two fully realized series of abstract oil paintings on panel. The painter, with studios in New York City and beside the Hudson River in Greene County, explores the relationship between the fluidity of paint and river surfaces affected by the intersection of natural and manmade phenomena. Altogether the paintings activated the gallery space into a cohesive site-responsive installation.

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On Bearing Witness and Embracing Beauty

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Unprecedented, 8 ft. x 15 ft., mixed media on canvas, 2021. Photo by Joseph Hu

For over fifty years, Philadelphia-based painter, photographer, and activist Diane Burko has translated her love for large open spaces and monumental geological sites into powerful and alluring landscapes. Her exhibition at the American University in Washington, D.C. (August 28 – December 12, 2021), titled Diane Burko: Seeing Climate Change 2002 – 2021, contained 103 paintings, photographs, and time-based media depicting mountains, oceans, snow and ice, glaciers, volcanos, and fires that address the growing impact of the climate crisis.

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Elegizing Ice: Jaanika Peerna

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Glacier Elegy Brooklyn, performance in public space with three performers and audience members, one block of ice, two sculptural elements, took place at the Brooklyn waterfront, New York City, October 20, 2020

New York-based artist and educator Jaanika Peerna grew up in Estonia during the Soviet era. Her drawings, installations, and performances all embody a sense of constant movement and change, either chaotic or orderly, that personifies the elements of water, ice, wind, air, and light. Peerna attributes many of the choices she has made about the materials she uses as well as her working methods to her childhood in her native land of ice and greyscale colors along the Baltic Sea. It was there where her body learned to embrace the movements specific to gliding on ice, where she observed the varied lines that skates made on the surface of ice, and where she mastered the use of the limited art materials available in the local Soviet-style school system – especially drawing with pencils on paper. To this day, she sees all of her work as drawing, “whether it is video or light installations, placing works in a room, drawing in space, leaving lines on paper, traces of movement and now performance.”

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Brie Ruais: Recording with Clay

In Dialogue with Brie Ruais


“Brie Ruais: Movement at the Edge of the Land”, installation of exhibition, courtesy The Moody Center for the Arts and albertz benda gallery. Photo by Nash Baker

Brie Ruais [b. 1982, Southern California] lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011. Ruais’ movement-based practice is legible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces and forms of the ceramic works. Each sculpture is made with the equivalent of her body weight in clay, resulting in human-scale works that forge an intimacy with the viewer’s body. Through her immersive engagement with clay, Ruais’s work generates a physical and sensorial experience that explores a new dialogue between the body and the earth.

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Deborah Kruger – Plumas at PRPG in Mexico City

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Deborak Kruger in front of Accidentals, 2020, screen-printing on recycled plastic bags, sewing, wrapping, waxed linen thread, 92 x 167 x 6″

Plumas, featuring Deborah Kruger’s recent work, is PRPG.mx’s premiere show in their newly expanded exhibition and residency space in Mexico City. In this sculptural installation, curated by Micheal Swank, Kruger focuses on the extinction of Mexican bird species, the death of Mexican indigenous languages, and the impacts of climate change on migration.

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In the Beginning There Was Only Water

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In the Beginning There Was Only Water: Panels 19-22, each panel 30″ x 15″, acrylic, oil pigment stick and mixed media on paper, 2021

While some of us taught ourselves to bake sourdough bread or to mend socks during the pandemic, the American painter and arts writer Susan Hoffman Fishman plunged herself into her studio and emerged, a year later, with a revised creation story. The result: a magnificent, nearly 50-foot (15 meters) opus entitled In The Beginning There Was Only Water. Currently on exhibit at the Five Points Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut through December 19, 2021, In The Beginning There Was Only Water reframes the biblical creation myth – in which “man” was granted “dominion” over all the Earth’s plants and animals – into a new, non-human-centric story.

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Theresa Hackett: Flipping the plane

Image from 1977 courtesy of the Artist

The PA based painter Theresa Hackett has been reflecting on landscape and environmental issues throughout her extensive body of work, Her paintings combine elements of drawing as well as different materials such as earth material and plastic. Altogether the process of coalescing all these elements is readily visible on the surface —the marks, bold shapes, vivid colors, texture— create landscapes resonating with vitality but also with an urgent sense of loss.

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Amanda Thackray: Surface Tension at NJCU

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Amanda Thackray with A Tangle; A Swarm; A Precondition of the Plastisphere, 2021

In her solo exhibition at the Lemmerman Gallery in NJCU curated by Doris Cacoilo, Amanda Thackray presents her handmade paper installations, prints and sculpture which altogether comment on plastic pollution and the fragility of marine environment. The artist creates an allegorical environment which both reflects and distorts an aquatic world.

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