South Fork Artists

www.bmashe.com

Reflections
I have only ever wished for all the time in the world, morning, noon and night to make and immerse myself in my work. I have found this time extremely difficult to focus and create. I find myself riddled with worry and concern for what is happening around us. It’s likely most people won’t ever have this much consecutive time available to us ever again. When life returns, our normal stress of money making and being held accountable by our personal and professional lives will set back in. I can’t make sense of much at this moment, but I am grateful for everyone in the creative community out East who has come together and lent a hand where needed, without being asked, checking in, leaving food on doorsteps. There is something to be said for all these beautiful displays of humanity alongside so much grief we’re experiencing everyday.

Artist Statement
My work plays with color, text, shapes and all the personal and worldly subjects that bring me anxiety, pleasure and everywhere in-between. Creating is how I best digest what is happening around me, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Drawing feels like meditation. Making a mess gives me comfort.

Biography
Brianna Ashe is an artist on the east end of Long Island. She enjoys cooking, spending time with friends and making things with her hands. Brianna makes a living by helping other artists hang shows, make, and problem solve creative issues.

www.philippecheng.com

Artist Statement
In the time of distance I have been thinking what was meaningful in the past and have thought often of the act of sending and receiving a letter. The exhibition will revolve around this idea and is part of a larger project entitled, “All The Light We Cannot See.” As part of this project the viewer, the driver and passengers, are invited to send their mailing address via email to studio@philippecheng.com to receive an element of this project via mail.

Biography
Philippe Cheng is a fine art-based photographer with studios in New York City and Bridgehampton, Long Island. His work is in the Library Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, Parrish Art Museum and in many private collections.

www.facebook.com/kelly.b.darr
IG @kellyb.darr

Artist Statement
As a visually impaired artist my concerns lie deeply in the understanding that vision is beyond the eyes – a transcendental, infinite experience of the heart that connects us each and all beyond what we see in the solely physical third dimensional experience. I often use the metaphor of reflectivity in my mixed media tactile painting for the ideal of shared truth.

Biography
Artist Kelly Darr is an East End artist who works from her studio in Long Island, NY. Charmed by a rich local history of American painters, she is inspired and moved by the first hand account of the intricate workings of nature that her studio is nestled amongst. Darr, who started out as a student traditional, classical academy, style drawing and painting, has evolved through the need to express herself to invent her own painting process and unique painting style, ranging from minimal to very elaborate. Darr has been a lifelong student of the arts receiving a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art that exposed her to a wide range of concepts of artmaking with its unique five year program. She went on as an artist teaching, showing and doing commission work. Her work has been exhibited in the New York area including William Paterson University and Slater Museum. Recently, she has shown locally at Depot Gallery, Woodbine Collection, White Room Gallery, Ashawagh Hall and Guild Hall.

www.jeremynative.com

Artist Statement
My photography explores indigenous identity, cultural assimilation, and the ancestral traditional practices of my tribe, the Shinnecock Indian Nation. Though science has solved many questions about natural phenomena, questions of identity are more abstract, the answers more nuanced. My work is a means of examining my identity and the identity of my community, specifically the unique experience of living on a sovereign Indian reservation and the problems we face.

Digital photography lets me create cinematic images. Nowhere have indigenous people been more poorly misrepresented than in American movies. My images question and disrupt the post-colonial narrative that dominates in film and media and results in damaging stereotypes, such as the “noble savage” depictions in Disney’s Pocahontas. As racial divisions and tensions reach a nationwide fever pitch, it’s more important to me than ever to offer a complex and compelling representation of indigenous people. I like making use of the cinema’s tools, the same ones directors have always turned against us (curiously familiar representations, clothing that makes a statement, pleasing lighting), to create conversations about uncomfortable aspects of post-colonialism. For example, in my 2016 project, “Nothing Happened Here,” stylized portraits of non-indigenous people impaled by arrows symbolize, in a playful way, the “white guilt” many Americans have carried through generations, and the inconvenience of co-existing with people their ancestors tried to destroy.

By looking to the past, I trace issues that plague indigenous communities back to their source. For example, research for my ongoing project “On This Site” entailed studying archaeological and anthropological records, oral stories, and newspaper archives. The resulting landscape photography honors Shinnecock’s 10,000-plus years’ presence in Long Island, New York. Working on that collection has left me with a better understanding of how centuries of treaties, land grabs, and colonialist efforts to white-wash indigenous communities have led to our resilience, our ways of interacting with our environment, and the constant struggle to maintain our autonomy.

Despite four hundred years of colonization, we remain anchored to our land by our ancient stories. The indigenous mythology that influences my photography grants me access to the minds of my ancestors, including the value they placed on our sacred lands. By outfitting and arranging models to depict those myths, I strive to continue my ancestors’ tradition of storytelling and showcase the sanctity of our land, elevating its worth beyond a prize for the highest bidder.

Biography
Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a contemporary fine art photographer and a tribal member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY. In his work, he explores indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. Dennis holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, and a BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University, NY. He currently lives and works in Southampton, New York on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.

www.ericdever.com

Artist Statement
For many, spring marks the beginning of the year. In the southern hemisphere the seasons follow in the opposite progression. I experience spring as a touchstone, a new beginning, a self awareness in nature which my paintings track. This season has been spent much closer to home. I find myself paying particular attention to spring as it unfolds, from a dim yellow or green in March, to pale pinks which build in intensity through April, followed in May by the return of the tree canopy first experienced as red and bright green hues.

Biography
Eric Dever’s paintings harken from experiences deep within his sensory memory, including growing up in California. “Los Angeles is subtropical, the sun is more intense and sets over the Pacific.” In Drive By, Dever paints his experience of plants that he cultivates in his Water Mill studio garden. Forms appear weightless and at times dematerialize reversing figure and ground. These sensations inform Dever’s work today here on the East End becoming examples of a type of compressed time. Dever developed his full spectrum visual language after years of studying white, black, and red, which the artist describes as like breaking a long fast, and continuing his inclusion of color, he arrived at his current work.

In January 2019 Dever’s exhibit Painting in a House Made of Air, at Berry Campbell in New York attracted a large audience. Dever’s 2017 exhibit Light, Energy and Matter at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles featured 45 works covering his visual interpretation of natural forces. At New York University’s Kimmel Galleries in 2015, Dever exhibited Clarity, Passion, and Dark Inertia, 29 works that spanned a decade.

Dever’s paintings are in a number of public collections including Grey Art Gallery, New York University, the Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall. Dever’s paintings are currently on view in U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong and Macau as part of the United States Department of State, Art in Embassies exhibition program.

Dever earned a Master of Arts from New York University in 1988 and worked in the architecture firm, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in New York, while continuing to exhibit his paintings. He moved to the East End in 2002 and became immersed in the artistic community. At Guild Hall his work, a 5 x 10 foot painting was placed on stage for Joseph Pintauro’s play, Cloud Life, as part of the “The Painting Plays.” Artist Robert Dash, invited Dever to teach the first painting classes at the Madoo Conservancy. Dever continues to present studio painting workshops at the Parrish Art Museum and the Andy Warhol Preserve-Visual Artist Workshop (September 2020). Dever is represented by Berry Campbell in New York.

www.sallyegbert.com

Biography
Sally Egbert has lived and worked in both East Hampton and New York City since 1982. She is the recipient of numerous grants from prestigious organizations such as Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation.

IG @esly.e.escobar

Artist Statement
Blue charm is A Blue Stone Pillar with engraved and Grouted Hieroglyphics it is a Symbol of good energy.

Biography
Esly E. Escobar creates work that combines techniques from readymade found art, assemblage and collage, Abstract Expressionism, and drip painting methods. The artist generally works in large format painting, often combining oils, acrylics, and enamels into a single work. His organic process involves positioning canvases flat on the floor, layering and dripping paint in a 360-degree angle until an “identity” or “character” is revealed from the abstractions. According to the artist, some of these non- representational characters “take on names, personalities, quirks, and background narratives of their own.” Escobar also uses diptych and triptych formats, and experiments with odd-shaped canvases and found objects such as album covers of old LPs incorporated into his mixed media paintings.

www.evafaye.com
IG @evamyeye

Artist Statement
Connecting with nature feels so important right now. As I walk down Ocean Road approaching the beach, I know I will be greeted with solace and discovery. I work in solitude each day, as I always have, and think of others that are unfamiliar with this experience. I’ve placed a work from my current series “Ocean Road” outside my home, as a symbol of that separation and isolation. As you ‘drive by’ my home and continue onto Ocean Road, I hope you may also catch glimpses of the language and shapes of our local nature that inspire me. I am grateful to this place and for the endurance of human connections that can never be severed, no matter the physical distance.

Biography
Eva Faye is from Oslo, Norway, currently living in New York City and Bridgehampton, New York. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at the Ecole Superieure d’Arts Graphiques and the Parsons School of Design in Paris and New York City, prior to her Master of Fine Arts Degree at Hunter College. Over the past thirty years, her drawings and paintings have been widely exhibited in Norway and the United States. She is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and numerous Norwegian grants and artist awards. Her work is prominent in many esteemed private and public collections, such as The National Gallery of Art, Oslo, Norway, The Norwegian Council for the Arts, Bærum Kommune, Norway, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, DNB Bank, New York City and Montefiore Art Collection, New York.

Eva’s work finds genesis in the mutual observance of nature; looking into her own inner archeology and vulnerability to transliterate what is nonverbal into external forms and substance. Her organic patterns map musings, memory and manifestations of the body onto vellum, paint, linen and wood. She has cultivated her practice with vellum over the past decade as a material that is demonstrative of organicity — supple, translucent, tensile and membrane-like. Once crafted from stretched animal skin, it was the material on which our ancient manuscripts were written and illustrated. Inherently, it is a medium that evolved alongside human thought, now manufactured and synthetic in our post-Industrialist world. Entrenched in metaphors of dichotomy and transience, Eva works in unison with its ephemeral and diaphanous nature — puncturing, cutting and painting — to provoke tessellated moments of visual time and experience. From afar, her work appears mathematical and fractalated, yet every cut into the vellum bears the mark of Eva’s hand. Her present series introduces oversized vellum pieces, reverentially cut and coated with oil paint and mounted to float from the wall. This dimensionality of lightness and form echo organic patterns within all life, reciprocally formed and deepened through the physicality of creation.

www.ericfischl.com

Artist Statement
This work is inspired by marriage ritual dance by the Nuba tribe. It is about energy, a life force and empowerment.

Biography
Eric Fischl is an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor. His artwork is represented in many distinguished museums throughout the world and has been featured in over one thousand publications. His extraordinary achievements throughout his career have made him one of the most influential figurative painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Please see his website for more information.

For the show Drive-By-Art I am presenting a work that is in memoriam of people who have passed during this crisis of Covid-19. I am encouraging the idea of spectators to participate in sharing their vision of what is learned from this crisis and what everyone would like to see emerge in the future. The sculpture will be presented at the curb in front of our house. I will have disposable chalk pieces available next to the sculpture for passers-by and visitors to share their hopes and thoughts and names of loved ones written onto the sculpture. The sculpture represents a continuum of life within death and death within life. 

Artist statement
As a biological system/entity I try to procure instruments and tools in the form of pictograms and as object enactors that tell stories about my existence, myths which goal to denote my consciousness . My work draws from the membrane separating mind as biology and biology as mind, opening pores between the world of dreams and the world of cells. An ancient Sufi sage has said that ‘the reality of knowledge is bewilderment.’ For me, this bewilderment exists as a state of enraptured Wonderment. I am nature experiencing itself as a pendulum swinging between existence and non-existence, a continual motion between being and non identity. Through focused intention, I hope to give creative autonomy to the act of creation. I am a translator, a perceiver, that creates an output in the form of tangible objects that formulate a reciprocal experience. 

The exploration of myself as nature intensely informs me. Beings in their psycho-spiritual, emotional, and political landscapes permeate my perceptions. I like to contemplate evolutionary movements involving the topology of microcosmic bubble-futures. I am continually hoping for the best outcomes in this shared journey on planet earth. This hope is not passive but activated by intense inner and outer focus and generated into my work. 

My work centers around faith in the creative process as an intellectual pursuit, as research into the foundations of humanness. The architecture of this pursuit takes the form of a kind of blind trust: that the creative connection is present as the innate basis of human presence . The interrelation of oneself, one’s environs and the actual perplexity of being a conscious organism forms a complex web, the filaments of which unravel as glimpses into mystery. 

As a translator and generator of thoughtscapes and perceptions, my intention is to keep these filaments of communication untethered from fragmentation in thought, in order to tap into the subtle infinities contained within the universality of nature. I am deeply intrigued by the morphology of flows of creation. The contemplation of the moment when the connection takes place, and something is born into the world is very exciting and is always new. In my work narratives are not linear but act as points of reference, trees with tangled limbs of love and presence. 

‘fields of experience, lines of perception, ubiquitous dreaming, content, color, line, context image is expression, line is impression wonder-worlds of knowing’

Biography
Saskia Friedrich (b. Munich, Germany) earned a BFA at School of Visual Arts in New York, NY. The artist has participated in exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY; Galerie MaxWeberSixFriedrich, Munich, Germany; Willoughby Sharp Gallery, New York, NY; Achim Kubinski Gallery, New York, NY; Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY; Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY; Autobody, Bellport, NY; and Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY, among others. Friedrich was the 2018 artist-in-residence at The Watermill Center, Watermill, NY. Friedrich’s work draws on multiple systems of thought and eclectic fields of interest: ecological architecture, sustainable cities, bio-structures, Sufi mysticism, and the tradition of whirling. She continues to concern herself with art expressed as environment and its relationship to oneself and others. With a meditative approach, Friedrich views her role as both a translator and perceiver deeply informed by nature. The work on display appropriately feels both terrestrial, and cosmic.