South Fork Artists

www.robingianis.com
IG @robingianis

Reflections
In approaching this project, I had to consider that my home is isolated from the street by a very long narrow drive and so I created something I could install by the road in order to be seen. I chose to break out of my usual small-scale ceramic and mixed media work, and felt it was only right to apply some of the restraints that my young art students have had on them sequestered at home, forging around their homes for things from which to make art. I tore into my closets, discovered stashed-away supplies, and came up with something of mixed media that would symbolize to me the concept of breaking through, a gateway moving from one experience to another, emerging on another side. It is a concept of hope – that we will all come through on the other side of this changed, despite some of our profound losses, better people, our eyes more open.

Artist Statement
I have lived in East Hampton for over thirty years. The rich history of the artist’s lives has surrounded me here, coached, cultivated and informed both my art and me. I believe my work is a fusion of environment, experience and my true self. I pay careful attention to details in nature. I have always been drawn to the light, the sky, the water, growing trees, greenery. I am drawn to specific contours, in the water lapping at the sand, the petals of a flower, moss growing on a rock, branches reaching for the sky, different fractals found in nature. I explore arrangements, especially through ceramic and mosaic arts, but also in a variety of media. I was fortunate enough to do my undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College, and University of Michigan in Florence, Italy, both places where I was challenged and inspired early in life. In addition to being an artist, I have been a Visual Art teacher at the Bridgehampton School for students from kindergarten through twelfth grade for almost twenty years. My students are another form of my art, teaching me and rewarding my love for what I do with their amazing responses and creations.

Biography
Robin Has lived in East Hampton for over thirty years, where she first arrived after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. Visual Art has always been her main form of expression. After years working with Ina Garten at the Barefoot Contessa Store in East Hampton, she returned to graduate school to become a visual art teacher. There she fell in love with the ceramic arts, teaching them and creating them herself. She has taught at the Bridgehampton School for almost 20 years, and considered her teaching one of the most creative aspects of her life’s work. She promotes alliances with students and local arts organizations such as the Parrish, Guild Hall, LongHouse and the Watermill Center, and has shown her own art locally in gallery and museum venues for over thirty years.

www.frankgillette.com

Biography
Merging a rich visual sensibility with an almost scientific engagement with taxonomy and ecological systems, Frank Gillette is a video pioneer whose multi-channel installations and tapes focus on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Gillette’s works draw parallels between technological, ecological, and cognitive processes. His meticulous, close-up visual records of ecological systems and natural landscapes are structured on rigorous observational systems and strategies of visual cross-associations.Gillette was an innovator of the multi-channel installation form, experimenting with image feedback, time-delay and closed-circuit systems. He works in a variety of mediums including photography, painting and collage. He is the recipient of numerous awards including fellowships from Rockefeller Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation, and grants from New York State Council oF the Arts and National Endowment for the Arts. He was artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1984-85. He is the author of numerous published works including Between Paradigms (1973) and Of Another Nature (1988). His work has been presented in solo exhibitions including: The Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Howard Wise Gallery, New York; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In addition, Gillette’s work has been included in numerous group shows including: Kunsthalle, Cologne; Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany; Venice Biennale; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others.

www.janetgoleas.com

Reflections
Coronavirus has been terrifying and has altered nearly everything in my life and the life of my son. Our expectations are foggy, but they will come into focus as we find new footing. I’m gratified that the skies are clearing, that wildlife is finding new balance, that even seismic activity has decreased. The flaws in our systems have been laid bare, and the ruthless greed of the 21st century is now exposed. I have many hopes, but a primary one is that the world learns that renewal is more important than financial gain. Lighting candles for the world and for our shared sense of renewal.

Artist Statement
My painting is an exploration of process, structure, and geometries that shift between depths. I paint with loose swaths of color and form that move about the picture plane seeking and gradually defining an interior anatomy. Gesture and precision are fundamental to these works, and I enjoy the movement and slather of the brush as it seeks to balance rhythm, awkwardness, and resolve. I want to marry the visceral and the absolute, and to anchor the composition with resolute abstract form. I’m interested in the oppositional – precision and disorder, singularity and multiplicity, solid and void – and feel I operate best in-between these visual contradictions. 

Biography
Janet Goleas studied painting and receiving both her BFA and MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. She developed her practice while teaching and exhibiting widely on the west coast, moving to New York City in 1983. There, Goleas moved from site-specific installation and sculptural works she had become known for to canvas painting. In 1997, she moved to Long Island’s east end first teaching at Southampton College, then becoming Director of Education at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Her practice evolved in this new environment, expanding to include not only painting but critical writing, curating, and lecturing. Goleas has exhibited her works in Europe and the U.S., most recently at Parrish Art Museum’s exhibition, “Artists Choose Artists.”  

www.carlyhaffner.com

Biography
Carly Haffner grew up in East Hampton, NY. She received a BFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Her last solo exhibition, “In the Woods,” was at Guild Hall in East Hampton November 14- February 23, 2020.  Haffner’s folk-inspired landscape paintings depict the woods with minimal lines and subtle color shifts, paying homage to another side of the ‘Hamptons’. She lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY. 

www.hiroyukihamada.com

Artist Statement
Artists are blessed with that rare moment when everything disappears in our studios except for our works and ourselves – when we feel the profound connection to what we have worked on as it melts with the world, space and time. Such an occasion is indeed very rare, but that is what I strive to capture when I struggle in my studio. As our world continues to be subservient to the hierarchy of money and violence, I believe the exploration of artists to perceive the world reaching beyond the framework of corporatism, colonialism and militarism continues to be a crucial part of being human.
How do we share that with other people though? I’ve spent decades of my life as an artist. The more I struggle with the framework of the market economy, as well as the social boundaries created by it, I feel the need to shift my approach in sharing what I can share. That is the general background of my practice as a sculptor.

Lockdown Therapy for Capitalism
April, 2020
By Hiroyuki Hamada

One might think that artists wouldn’t mind being isolated and having more time in studios on account of the current Coronavirus situation. After all, we spend an enormous amount of time alone, and isolation allows us to have uninterrupted amounts of time to let our imaginations fly.But there are other elements in play when we examine creativity. For example, it is crucial that we feel safe to expose all our senses to our environment so that we ground our minds properly to our surroundings, harmoniously with all our channels open.

When the “lockdown” started I was at an art residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I lived in a communal setting with twenty other artists and writers. As soon as public spaces became inaccessible and “social distancing” became the norm at the residency, many of the fellow artists experienced lack of productivity. I felt an immediate blockage to my making process.

Perhaps, since our society does not make artists’ activities a priority, this might be the last thing one would consider as a serious problem. And to a lesser extent such a concern might be secondary to many artists themselves who will be subjected to enormous economic difficulties.

It is “understood” that this is a “crisis” and we must “fight together“ against our “common enemy” which is the virus. But who could blame those of us who are very much suspicious of such a momentum, as we hear decrees being issued to dictate our social activities while all instruments of state violence and repression are in place to regulate our behaviors.
After all we live in the same society which has baselessly demonized Muslims while bombing, colonizing and destroying their countries in the name of “war on terror”. Young black people have been openly demonized to justify gentrification, mass incarceration, exploitation through substandard labor conditions and so on and so forth in the name of “war on drug” and “tough on crime”.

We know that a “crisis” presents opportunities and tools for the ruling class to shape and perpetuate the social structure. The system in which they thrive is always “too big to fail” while oppressed people keep failing so that they are safely cornered into hopelessness, cynicism and complacency to the feudal order of money and violence.

It is not a speculation that there are people who prosper and even benefit during an economic crisis—as smaller business owners struggle, large corporations and banks benefit from huge government subsidies, giving them more power to buy failing small businesses, for example. And it is a fact that many of those people have enormous economic power to shape the policies that can benefit themselves. It is not a speculation that they would appreciate having strict measures of control against the people by limiting their freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to travel, or by installing means of surveillance, check points and official certifications for activities that might give freedom to the people beyond the capitalist framework. It is not a speculation that they would benefit from moving our social interactions to the digital realm, which can commodify our activities as marketable data for the advertising industry, insurance industry and any other moneyed social institutions Including education, political institution, legal institution, and financial institution. Such matters should be seen within the context of the western history being shaped by unelected capitalists with their enormous networks of social institutions. In fact, private foundations and NGOs are working with governmental organizations and global institutions to implement potentially dangerous policies of draconian measures as well as financialization of our activities for sometime. According to researchers—Cory Morningstar, Alison McDowell and others, the potential impact of the transformation which is about to take place through the Internet, block chain technology, artificial intelligence, and etc. under the banner of the fourth industrial revolution can be devastatingly inhumane to our species’ path. Examining those matters must not be subjected to being labeled as “conspiracy” and dismissed.

Needless to say, a draconian momentum against the capitalist hierarchy accelerates hardships of “invisible people” who struggle against economic deprivation and social repression. How do homeless people “stay home”? How do people in jail practice “social distancing”? How are people vulnerable to domestic violence protected? How do small business owners continue to stay in business? How do poor people survive while public services and spaces are eliminated, while affluent people are stock piling in their generously equipped gated communities. How do people with addiction stay sober? How do people with suicidal tendency secure their dwindling connection to humanity?

But those discussions are rare among us. A hint of doubt can trigger those people who are “fighting together”. Because once our creative minds learn to live safely in an authoritarian framework of draconian rules and decrees, the narrow framework restricts our thoughts and ideas. Our minds get weaponized to uphold the authoritarianism as a path to “democracy”, “freedom”, “justice” and “humanity”, which have been mere euphemisms to describe blank checks given to the ruling class. Once people turn into soldiers of the authoritarianism, the path to the ”solutions” is paved by their relentless adherence to corporate political parties, official decrees and carefully concocted narratives within the capitalist framework. Our discussions cease to be mutually respectful exchange, instead, they become battle grounds in which dissenting voices are vetted, attacked and eliminated.

A society that can’t sustain artists is a society that kills minds to care, understand, empathize and share. A society that enforces its imperatives with fear instead of trust in humanity deprives a healthy mechanism to guide itself.

As I see how public sentiment is developing over the virus situation, I must mention one more thing. There has been a proven method of silencing anti-capitalist voices within our society, used by media, political figures, corporate dissidents and others. It requires a few steps.

First, amplify the voices of people who willingly sacrifice those who they consider to hold lower positions than they do in demanding their righteous positions within the capitalist hierarchy. The voices might come from racist nationalists, patriarchal misogynists, flag waving anti-immigrant activists or heartless Trump supporters demanding old people to die during the coronavirus pandemic. Those people recognize that an aspect or a policy of the establishment will compromise their lives—after all they are also oppressed by the capitalist order. However, they do embrace the capitalist order in essence. They do not tolerate sharing their positions with people who they despise.

Second, claim that you are with victims of racism, misogyny or xenophobia, or old people who are vulnerable during the coronavirus pandemic.

Third, falsely equate an anti-capitalist perspective with that of those political villains.

Forth, dismiss those who are calling out the ruling class agenda as “racist”, “misogynists”, “fascist worshiper” and so on.

This method has been very effective. I am sure that anyone who has expressed a concern over capitalist domination can recall being labeled as what they actually oppose.

The method achieves a few things at the same time. First, it obscures the mechanism of capitalist hierarchy. Second, it divides people who should be fighting against the system together—obscuring the meaning of class struggle. Third, it augments the capitalist hierarchy. Forth, it vitalizes the political legitimacy of corporate political parties which utilize the division. Needless to say, the narrative of division is actively generated by corporate political parties as well.

It is imperative that we recognize the predicaments of the people who are most oppressed within our society, while we firmly recognize the dynamics within the capitalist hierarchy, and stay away from being a part of the mechanism which safely turns our predicaments into driving forces of capitalism.

I hope above writing can generate much needed discussions on the topic among us.

Biography
Hiroyuki Hamada has exhibited widely in gallery and non-commercial settings alike including Guild Hall of East Hampton, Bookstein Projects, Southampton Arts Center, Roger Williams University, The List Gallery, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and O.K. Harris Works of Art, among numerous others. Hamada holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture with a Skowhegan Fellowship. Over the years, he has been awarded various residencies most recently including the Pollock Krasner Foundation Mid-Career residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and twice received New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in sculpture. Hamada was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.

www.holdenarch.com

Artist Statement
After quarantining ourselves in our house in Sag Harbor with our son and future daughter-in-law, and leaving so many items behind in New York, and not able to work as an architect for a while, I realized that I wanted to focus on artwork. I would have to start using what materials I had at hand to make this artwork. When my mother died last year, I inherited hundreds of 35mm slides that my father had taken in the 50’s and 60’s. These and others had been kept for years in boxes but noone looks at them anymore. I used the slides as building blocks and created a small sculpture in the shape of a house, lighted from within. Since I have been sequestered for almost two months now, its given me much more time to look back and assess where I’ve been and where I will go in the future. This project is a physical manifestation of that assessment.

Biography
Barry Holden is an artist and a licensed architect. During his career, he created large scale, public artworks across the country. An aluminum and neon sculpture titled, “Hover” in Seattle, an homage to the Wright Brothers first flight titled, “Kill Devil Hill”, for Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, as well as temporary installations, such as “B. Holden to Diderot” at the Federal Courthouse in New York, “Levitation”, a full scale house floating in the air, at the NY Hall of Science in Queens, and solo shows at the original Clock Tower Gallery, in New York, as well as numerous solo and group exhibitions. 

With his partner, artist Nina Yankowitz, he created major public artworks in Hoboken and Jersey City for two light rail stations, a granite and interactive sound project titled, “Interactive Poetry Walk” in Cleveland, a public seating project in Los Angeles, and other installation artworks across the country and in Europe. As an architect, he has designed numerous apartments, houses, offices, and a bagel factory. For the last 25 years, he has lived and worked in New York in Soho, and in a house that he designed Sag Harbor.

www.alicehope.com
IG @alice___hope

Artist Statement
The used can tab can be looked at from a multiplicity of perspectives – that its proportion is in the Golden Mean like the Parthenon; that it’s a tool – a lever; that it’s trash; that it’s an icon; that it’s an anti-phallus with its equal negative and positive space; that as a floor plan it emulates Renaissance cathedrals with its apse and nave; its ergonomics; its timed obsolescence; its demographically democratic use, but in my work I focus on the used tab as a relic of consumption and as a token for redemption.   

I did a 6 month site-specific installation with more than a million used can tabs on view outside the Queens Museum.  Each of the million tabs in the project represented an individual narrative of production, consumption, collection, and donation, making the project an inadvertently global collaboration. Related to the tradition of Land Art, the Queens Museum installation was intended to be experienced in situ, behind glass that reflected the changing view of the iconic Unisphere, the consistent flow of LaGuardia Airport’s air traffic, and the passers by. This installation initiated my Can Tab Project, reckoning can tab’s fluctuating value and  meaning in continually changing contexts.

Pop Up, in Marfa, Texas, TAB, at Ricco Maresca Gallery, and Surge, at Tripoli Gallery, one person shows, reifies the can tab, both in material and subject, by reframing it’s commodified and cultural status. Context shifts the used can tab from obsolescence to  art; the works exploit the can tab as subject, object, and material.

I weave in and out of transforming and highlighting the tab— as an object and as a subject. Sometimes the work can be experienced without actually knowing what the material is, and sometimes the tab is explicitly present as a subject of the work. In Aeon, the tab was used as a functional unit; it’s unit-ness was useful, personal, additive, maneuverable, tag—able. In the embassy commission the tabs congregate into populations while  individually acting as ‘marks’. Ultimately all my  works are devoted to the tension between Minimalism/Maximalism and numeracy’s hybrid aesthetic. 

Biography
Alice Hope was named 2018 “Woman to Watch” for New York by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She holds an M.F.A. from Yale University and shows at Ricco Maresca Gallery in Manhattan. Alice has created numerous public and residential commissions, among them a large-scale magnetic installation, “Under the Radar”, in 2012, at Camp Hero State Park in Montauk, NY for the Parrish Art Museum. She often incorporates binary code and repetition in her compositions. In her 2013 Armory Show Project, Alice was commissioned by the Fair to create two public works; one panel innumerably repeated the binary code for the word “love”, and the other repeated the code for “blind”. In 2013, she inaugurated WNYC Greene Space’s new lobby, where she installed a dense site specific work with thousands of neodymium magnets and pieces of ball chain. She was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Art and Design from 2014-15, and then built a six month site-specific installation outside the Queens Museum with more than a million used can tabs. This work was part of a wider project that reckoned the fluctuating value and meaning of can tabs in continually changing contexts. In 2018, she had a one person show at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, had three of her installations on view. In 2018-19, she initiated an all school/all year social practice piece at Hayground School that culminated in an interactive gallery show. In 2019, she was commissioned by Art in Embassies to build an installation, with hundreds of thousands of used can tabs and marine netting, for the new U.S. Embassy lobby in Maputo, Mozambique that will be installed in 2020. In 2020, she had a one person show and residency in Tripoli Gallery’s new space in Wainscott, NY; also in 2020 she will be showing in Ricco Maresca’s new space in New York City.

www.sorenhope.com

Artist Statement
I paint figures engaged with each other and with landscape, in narratives that are both overt and elusive. While I render figures and surfaces delicately, emphasizing the nuance of light on skin or fur, there is often an element of fumbling or grasping in the narratives. In much of my recent work, my paintings depict bodies negotiating perceived loss or danger of a benign and minuscule sort. I treat the body at a slightly larger-than-life scale, which elevates the figure while magnifying its corporeality. These scenes take place in grand bucolic settings, creating tension between the myopic absorption of the task and the vastness and beauty of the surrounding scene. 

With both the body and with narrative, I’m playing with what is withheld and what gets revealed to the viewer. In these painted scenes, the focus of the figures is often kept invisible, leaving the viewer in the same state of frustrated suspense as the subjects. Likewise, with my use of the figure in this body of work, I’m interested in what happens when certain clothing articles are left on or body parts hidden—the humor, awkwardness, or contextual pragmatism that’s present in a female body clothed only in a bathing suit bottom and a baseball hat. In all of this, I’m thinking about how we fill in the blanks when we are presented with only partial access, and the charge that exists in this state of unresolve.

Biography
Soren Hope was born in 1993 on the East End of Long Island. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art at Carleton College in 2015. She has exhibited paintings in group shows on Long Island and in Brooklyn. Soren exhibited her first solo show of large-scale paintings at Duck Creek Arts Center in Springs, New York in September 2018. Soren has attended artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center in November 2016, where she received a month-long full fellowship, and Home of the Brave in the ghost town of Cisco, Utah in November 2019.

www.ericalynnhuberty.com

Reflections
During this pandemic, we have inadvertently begun to re-wild the earth, creating wider and more biodiverse habitats and inviting previous “tenants” back to their home. We are enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. And, in looking out our window, down our streets, and up at our skies, we are amazed at the sight. In the words of environmental journalist Isabella Tree:  “We assume we know what is good for a species but we forget that our landscape is so changed, so desperately impoverished, we may be recording a species not in its preferred habitat at all, but at the very limit of its range.”

Artist Statement
Huberty’s work is fiber-based, and mingles textiles and sewing arts techniques with watercolor and ink, embroidery, crochet and knitting, loom-woven grounds, mediums overlapping as if done simultaneously, and exploring the historical tradition of “women’s work.” The process is at once tedious, time-consuming and physically demanding, as well as a symbol of feminine self-worth.  Sometimes, the narrative is allowed to develop organically from textures and images on existing textiles, or in segments of her own sketches, scraps of trim, lace and appliqués, crocheted strands; at other times, a set mythos is constructed from her own fictional or autobiographical narratives. She is informed by 17th-19th Century naturalist drawings and the fragility of endangered environments, flora and fauna, and vanishing historically-significant sites.

Biography
Erica-Lynn Huberty earned her MFA in Painting from Bennington College, though she has engaged with needlework and the fiber arts since childhood. Her art has been exhibited at the Southampton Arts Center, Racine Art Museum, WI; David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn; Ricco Maresca Gallery and Denise Bibro Fine Arts in Manhattan; Sara Nightingale Gallery, Sag Harbor, and Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton. She has created site-specific installations at an abandoned beach house in Bridgehampton, for MATTA in SoHo, the Sag Harbor Whaling & Historical Museum in Sag Harbor, NY, and on Mary Mattingly’s Wetland, for Parrish Art Museum’s ambitious “Radical Seafaring” exhibition.

www.bryanhunt.com

Artist Statement
drive slow, stay safe, enjoy the day

Biography
Bryan Hunt (b. 1947 in Terre Haute, IN) developed an early interest in architecture and space exploration having worked as a technical assistant at the Kennedy Space Center. In 1968, Hunt moved to Los Angeles and studied at the Otis Art Institute where he received his B.F.A. in 1971. Early exhibitions include The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, The Clocktower, New York (1974), “Young American Artists” at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1978), “made by sculptors” at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1978), “Decade in Review” at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1979), and “Visionary Images” Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1979) Venice Biennale-1980, 3-Whitney Museum Biennials and  2011- ‘Waterfalls on Park Ave’ 10 sculptures installed on Park Ave. NY.   His work is included in museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas,Texas. In 2006 Hunt was commissioned by the City of New York to create a permanent sculpture at Coenties Slip Park in Lower Manhattan, he also has sculpture commissions in Tokyo, Barcelona and Long Beach Ca. among others.

Bryan Hunt’s solo exhibition at Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton opens July 11. www.duckcreekarts.org