South Fork Artists

Biography
Joan Jonas is a multimedia artist whose work encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas later became a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s. Her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video, to conceptual art and theater. Jonas often engages language and explores the relationship between art and narrative forms. Jonas’s work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Queens Museum of Art, Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany, and Van Abbenmuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Jonas was selected to represent the United States at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. HangarBicocca in Milan presented a survey of Jonas’s work, Light Time Tales, in early 2014. The gallery is a former industrial space that presented ten installations and ten single-channel videos from throughout her career. Subsequent to receiving her 1995 Grants to Artists award, Jonas was the recipient of an Anonymous Was A Woman Award (1998), a DAAD Berlin Artist-in-Residence, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2009). Previous to her 1995 FCPA recognition, Jonas was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1974), an American Film Institute “Maya Deren” Award, and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1990). Jonas received a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College in 1958, studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. Jonas has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1998, where she is Professor Emerita in the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology.

www.tanyaminhasstudio.com
http://www.secondstreetgallery.org/index.php/exhibitions/detail/nature-tells-its-own-story
IG @tanyaminhasstudio 

Reflections
My paintings, installations, and drawings focus entirely on exploring the invisible forces of nature and the imprint they leave as tangible evidence of their existence on and in our lives. A sunny day and its importance for agriculture, that will be our sustenance. A tsunami – water stirred by wind –  that can devastate our material belongings. The pandemic for me has drawn to the forefront the strong destructive force in nature that some say has been evoked by our disregard for the balance of nature, and our disrespect for its creatures. I am even more convinced that there is a method to nature’s beauty and also to its potentially chaotic madness, and that we as human beings have been forcefully overstepping our boundaries. Most days I am scared, as I imagine these microscopic bits threatening possible death coming uninvited, to mingle with the air we breathe. The reason I chose the paintings that I am planning to show this weekend is that they represent invisible nature. Wildflower seeds take from nature -completely devoid of human intention and interaction- germinate and ultimately blossom, showing up in fields and in the cracks of urban pavement. Life goes on in the natural world around us. This reminder of nature’s resilience fills me with optimism that this disruption will introduce us to a new path where we can live in greater, and more thoughtful harmony with nature, than we did before the pandemic.

Artist Statement
Tanya Minhas grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and moved to the United States to attend Princeton University. She subsequently attended graduate school at Columbia University, and the Art Students League where she painted portraits in oil.  

Minhas ventured away from figurative painting, making repetitive drawings using ink, paint, and yarn about the unseen miniscule energies that subtly direct our lives. Her recent art practice explores the state of harmony between the internal and the external, the visible and the invisible, and how the strength of one’s intrinsic life force affects this harmony, offering an impetus to balance our internal lives with an increasingly tempestuous external world.

Minhas says of her work, “Each painting is about an invisible memory or impression left by the myriad different forces in nature – a leaf falling to the earth displaces air as it falls, tracing an invisible pattern, that I can see with my heart, or my imagination, or whatever it is in myself that finds these moments important, and yet I am unable to express the awe of it precisely with words.  Sand ripples are another example, that fossilized tell stories of environmental history, and that can immediately tell you about yesterday’s storm. Snowflakes as they melt transform states of existence; the movement from solid to liquid is a geometric change visible under a microscope. Thus each painting, drawing, or wall installation, is a story of a moment in nature that is historical, material, and ethereal, all at the same time. 

Biography
Tanya Minhas is a visual artist living and working in New York and Long Island. Minhas grew up in Pakistan and originally moved to the United States to attend Princeton University. Variably using ink, paint, and yarn, her intricate artwork explores the unseen components of nature, originating from transformation, dislocation, entanglement, resuscitation, forced separation, the contrasting and varied faces of beauty, destruction and rebirth. She is fascinated by the composition and states of matter that transform, direct and redirect those forces unapparent to the human eye. 

Due to the detailed and contemplative nature of her paintings and repetitive wall drawings, Minhas’ production is small. Her current solo exhibition “Nature Tells Its Own Story” remains on view at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia through June 2020. Her wall drawing commission for Joseph Editions in Nashville, Tennessee, is scheduled for installation in October 2020.  In 2019, her paintings were exhibited at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton and at Walter Arader Himalayan Art in New York City. 

An extended exhibition and commission history is available  on request.

www.daltonportella.com
IG @dltnart

Biography
Dalton Portella b.1958 Miami, Florida of Brazilian parents, has been drawing and painting since he was a child. When he was 12 his mother took him and his three sisters to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to live near her family after separating from his father, a violent alcoholic. At 17 he was emancipated and moved to California at 18 to study art at USIU. At 20 he moved to NYC and enrolled in Parsons school of Design, studying at night while working during the day. He was forced to drop out due to a loss of financial aid and pursued a career in commercial art, retouching photos on film while drawing and painting daily.

In the 1980s, with the invention of the Quantel Paintbox, Dalton was one of the first artists to pioneer digital photo manipulation and art. He became a freelance artist for Miramax movie posters, helping to create some of their most iconic posters, Pulp Fiction, Swingers, Shakespeare In Love, Kill Bill, and Frida to name a few.

He always felt his primary purpose was to create and left the commercial industry to pursue his fine art. In 2001 he moved to Montauk, NY where he lives and creates across a wide range of mediums, exhibiting extensively.

www.cliffordross.com

Artist Statement
My goal with NIGHTTIME VIDEO INSTALLATION (8pm-Midnight) is to celebrate nature through color. The first exhibited version in 2010 at the Site Santa Fe Biennial included an original score by Philip Glass.

Biography
Multi-media artist Clifford Ross, well known for his photographs of hurricane waves shot at Georgica Beach in East Hampton, has exhibited in many leading international museums including the Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and J. Paul Getty Museum. His dramatic 2017 outdoor video installation of Digital Waves at the Parrish Art Museum is well remembered by residents and visitors to the East End.

www.berrycampbell.com
www.susanvecsey.com

Artist Statement
As a painter, I’m interested in creating iconic and universal imagery. I begin by using shapes found in nature, discovered through drawing in charcoal from direct observation. Landscape is a starting point, a vehicle to painting, like a figure or room interior. When I’m working I think a lot about freedom and restraint, in color and composition. With a blank canvas you are free to create anything, but your source material, in this case the landscape, is the constraint and a parameter. I consider many compositions, decide on the correct scale for each painting, and execute elaborate color studies to discover four or five colors that will lock together. Many emotions can be conveyed through color, form and shape. I work with the painting flat on the floor, without drawing marks, without brushes, and instead pour or let gravity move the paint, or by dripping and moving the paint with a palette knife. I work in very thin layers in order to maintain the beautiful and rough surface of the linen. Like a watercolorist, it’s not possible to make corrections: with poured paint, timing is everything and it’s important to be decisive with it and to accept or reject the unexpected.

Biography
Susan Vecsey was born in New Jersey and currently lives and works in both New York City and East Hampton, New York. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, and her Master of Fine Arts from the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, studying under Graham Nickson. In 2012, Vecsey was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. In 2017, Susan Vecsey had a solo museum exhibition at the Greenville County Museum in South Carolina, featuring numerous large-scale paintings and a catalog with an essay by Phyllis Tuchman. That same year, the John Jermain Memorial Library, Sag Harbor, New York, presented another solo exhibition of Vecsey’s paintings and works on paper. In reference to Vecsey’s 2014 show at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, Franklin Einspruch declared in Artcritical, “this is virtuoso painting.” Vecsey’s work was featured in Guild Hall Museum’s 2014 Selections from the Permanent Collection curated by Museum Director/Chief Curator, Christina Strassfield. She has collaborated with numerous architects and designers, including Mabley Handler Design, Water Mill, New York, and Daniel Kahan, Smith and Moore Architects, Palm Beach, Florida. In recent years, the distinguished design dealers, Lee Jofa and Brunschwig & Fils, have used several of her paintings in advertising campaigns. Vecsey has been featured in magazines such as Architectural Digest, Hamptons Magazine, and Veranda. Vecsey is represented by Berry Campbell Gallery in New York. Vecsey is widely held in both public and private collections including the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina and Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton. Vecsey will have her next solo exhibition at Berry Campbell Gallery, 530 West 24th Street, NYC, on July 9 – August 12, 2020.

www.dianneblell.com
IG @dianneblell

Reflections
First, I truly hope the Pandemic will heighten consciousness, desire and respect for the quality of our global environment. In the context of the Art World, I firmly believe it will effect inevitable changes in our working and exhibiting arrangements professionally — and Privately and Socially re-define or alter our innate conscious awareness of intimacy, contact, and caring concern for one another by this exacted experience of distancing. Just as in my Table for Two/Separate Tables installation, an element of inherent horror dwells with wonder under the surface of our far-fetched idealistic and romantic fantasies in Fairy Tales. ‘Will we live happily ever after?’

Artist Statement
Dianne Blell’s Table for Two/Separate Tables. Dessert, set at two tables, chained together yet six feet apart, beneath a chandelier, is demonstrative of distress and liminality in our contemporary society of ‘distance.’ Overtly, the chain is an emblem of a modernized captivity — the paradox of familiar comfort and physicality of isolation. Yet, still shackled together, the tables are an allegory for the inner-emotional-pull to be near another human being. (Where does this pull originate?) This yearning for nearness must be repressed; lure is eclipsed by suspicion. Here, transgressing social ‘distance’ mandates may harm both the Self and the Other — an unfamiliar segregation that newly permeates the psyche. This piece continues Dianne’s overarching, lifelong thematic unpacking of the complexities of ‘desire’ throughout different art-historical periods. Yet where ‘desire’ was previously constructed as the ineluctable intensity of lure, Table signifies a historical moment in its censure. Written by Rachel M. Ward.  Written by Rachel M. Ward.

Biography
Dianne Blell is a Fine Art photographer working in New York City most known for her classical photographs depicting archetypal mythological and religious Art Historical themes with live models, costumes and elaborate hand-painted studio sets. Using 4×5 large format in her current series “Artifacts”(working title, since 2019), tattered, discarded fragments of furnishings create disrupted still life studies. She has been exhibiting her work since the 1970s and received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, National Endowment for the Arts grant, and several other awards. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography for her experimental Pre-Photoshop digital work in her series “Circus Animals Desertion” (1989). Her subsequent Photoshop mytho-scape ensembles, “Desire for the Intimate Deity,” took nearly a decade to complete after her studio, located at Ground Zero, was decimated in 9/11. Photographing from the rooftop of and through her studio windows, her photos of the aftermath of this tragedy are now in the 9/11 Memorial Museum collection. Dianne was represented by the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, from 1982 until its closing in 2000 having had four one person shows. Dianne is now affiliated with the esteemed photography venue, Holden Luntz Gallery. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Parrish Museum, Guild Hall of East Hampton, Neuberger Museum, New Britain Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography, Chazen Art Museum, and the University Art Museum at Berkeley.

Artist Statement
I believe that art should be a conversation. Using projected light, my pieces aim to inject humor and beauty into a dark environment to spark a reaction from the viewer. Connecting to the community and our local landscapes and environment through the use of light, dark, and movement is central to my exploration.

Biography
Joe Brondo is an interdisciplinary artist and an East Hampton native. In the world of projection design he has collaborated on many theatrical endeavors in The Hamptons. He has assisted on technical installations for Barbara Kruger, Tony Oursler, and Christine Sciulli and has created site-specific projection/light installations for many programs and performances in the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall including Extinction and Romeo & Juliet. Last year he collaborated with artist Cindy Pease Roe for a site-specific work at the Whaling Museum in Sag Harbor. He is also the Digital Media Creative Manager at Guild Hall.

www.monicabanks.com

Artist Statement: Brains In Our Arms
Long misunderstood, underestimated and feared, the octopus is now known to be a highly intelligent problem solver who uses tools to build his own environment and play games. Typically a loner, his exceptional eyesight makes him highly sensitive to his surroundings and he can change shape dramatically to fit through a space the size of his eye or change the color and texture of his skin to communicate with others or hide from predators. In addition to the one in his large head, the octopus has a brain in each of his dexterous and curious arms. Essentially, the artist in Covid-19 isolation is a land octopus.

Biography
Monica Banks is a sculptor who has been creating public works, site-specific installations, and showing work in museums, galleries, and other venues for 30 years. She created “Faces: Times Square,” a block-long sculpture which stood in Times Square from 1996-2009, for which she won an award from The Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Her permanent public works are located in the Bronx, Binghamton NY, Charlotte NC, and West Nyack NY. She has done site-specific installations at The Carriage House at the Islip Art Museum, The Rockland County Center for the Arts, The American Craft Museum, Spring Break Art Show, and other venues. Permanent collections holding her work include Parrish Art Museum, The University Museum of Contemporary Art at University of Mass. Amherst, Islip Art Museum, and Daura Gallery at Lynchburg College.

Banks started her current body of work in 2014. This work has been covered by The New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, East Hampton Star, Sag Harbor Express, and Hamptons Art Hub, among other publications, and has won awards from Jocelyn Miller, assistant curator at MOMA PS1; Benjamin Genocchio; Marla Prather while curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC; and the curators at the Heckscher Museum of Art. In 2016, Jorge Pardo selected her work to be shown alongside his own work at the Parrish Art Museum, “Artists Choose Artists.” She has had solo or dual shows at Sara Nightingale Gallery in Sag Harbor every year since 2015.

www.suzanneanker.com

Biography
Suzanne Anker is a Bio Art pioneer, visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, she calls attention to the beauty of life and the “necessity for enlightened thinking about nature’s ‘tangled bank’.” She works in a variety of media ranging from large-scale photography, sculpture and installation as well as live plants which grow by LED lights. Her work has been shown at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Daejeon Biennale, Korea; Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, China; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Today Art Museum, Beijing, China; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; P.S.1 Museum, New York, NY; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, Berlin, Germany; Center for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Germany; Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; and International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, and Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. She is a member of the National Academy of Design, an honorary society of notable American artists. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and the SVA Bio Art Laboratory.

www.elenabajo.com

Artist Statement
Elena Bajo is an artist, choreographer and cofounder of the LA collective D’CLUB dedicated to climate action. Her artistic practice weaves both personal and political narratives into materials and movements that generate new compositions. Her multidisciplinary practice engages ideas of nature and the body as a political and social entity questioning its relationship to ecologies of capital. She works both individually and collectively using choreography, sculpture, performance, architecture, life sciences, text and video.

Biography
Elena Bajo has an MFA from Central Saint Martins, London, Masters in Genetic Architecture from ESARQ, Barcelona, and a degree in Pharmacology, Complutense University, Madrid. She studied the Laban & Bartenieff Movement at TanzFabrik, Center for Contemporary Dance, Berlin. She was a co-founder of the temporary art project EXHIBITION, 2009, NY. She has taught and lectured at Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, Berlin; Goldsmith’s College, London; Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, Providence; and Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield among other institutions. She has exhibited and performed internationally: EFA, NY; Movement Research, NY; APA, Brussels; LAMAG, LA; Blue Project Foundation, Barcelona; Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico; Garcia Galeria, Madrid; Kunsthalle Sao Paulo; Stacion, Pristina, Kosovo; Artium Museum of Contemporary Art, Vitoria; 44th Salon Nacional de Artistas, Colombia; Annex14, Zurich; Kai 10 Arthena Foundation, Dusseldorf; DRAF, London; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; 3rd Mardin Biennial, Turkey, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Performa Biennial, NY; Sculpture Center, NY; She has been awarded residencies at Skowhegan, Maine; ISCP, NY; Ratti Foundation,Como IT; Goldrausch Berlin, DE. She received a New York Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency grant award in 2019; the Audemars Piguet award, ArcoMadrid 2017; the Botin Foundation International Visual Arts Grant award 2018. She has recently released an artist monograph Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Art 2019.