the SOURCE OF EVERYTHING

CURATED BY KATE ORNE

MAY 12 – AUG 19, 2024

On view May 12 through August 19, 2024 with Tour Participation and during special programs and events.

Within Dragon Rock House and Studio, 2024 Art + Design resident curator Kate Orne presents The Source of Everything with works in wood, metal, wool felt, and ceramic by Hudson Valley creatives Jeremy Anderson, Sam Falls, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, Kieran Kinsella, Lola Montes, Rodger Stevens, and Sagarika Sundaram - all artists with a deep connection to Nature. In the spirit of Russel Wright's intimate dialogue with the landscape at Manitoga, the installation encourages us to continue this meaningful conversation about how we are inspired by nature and where that inspiration leads us.

KATE ORNE
A photographer and former editor at Interview magazine, Kate Orne is the founder and editor of Upstate Diary, a biannual international publication created in 2015, which features artists who live and work close to nature. Past curations include RENEW in Hudson, NY (2023), an exhibition that invited artists to investigate renewable materials in the world around them with artists Sam Falls, Kat Howard, Kieran Kinsella, Kiva Motnyk, and Dana Sherwood; and In 3s at Blue Barn, Stone Ridge, NY (2022), including ten rurally based artists working primarily in natural materials – Jeremy Anderson, Irja Bodén, Neal Hollinger, Kat Howard, Christopher Kurtz, Jason Middlebrook, Peter Speliopoulos, Kentaro Takashina, Joshua Vogel, Nadia Yaron. Orne has lived in the Hudson Valley since 2009.

Jeremy Anderson is an artist based in New York who has worked in the ceramics medium for 25 years. From the beginning of his work with clay, creating has served Anderson as a conduit to tap into childlike play: the process of throwing, assembling, and painting built around meditative make-believe. Each sculpture is multifaceted and unique; in their collectiveness, however, the contours of the human condition begin to form, modulating between perfections and imperfections and highlighting the hybrid of tensions that underpin our collective experience as individuals within a society. He co-founded APPARATUS 2012, a design studio known for its lighting, furniture, and interiors.

Sam Falls was raised in Vermont and lives in the Hudson Valley. Sam’s work draws from photography, painting, and sculpture, using plant life as his subject matter and raw material, utilizing the elements — sunshine and rainfall — to create his work. He explores the transience of beauty (and the beauty of transience), recognizing that the blooming of the flowers that he grows himself on his property to the national forests around the country are part of a broader lifecycle that also includes decay. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York; Eva Presenhuber, New York & Zurich; and Galleria Franco Noero, Torino

Kieran Kinsella is a sculptor/furniture maker based in Accord, New York. He makes work carved from locally sourced whole logs that is both sculptural and functional. He is self-taught in woodworking through apprenticeships with Adirondack boat builders and furniture makers.

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray received her MFA in Metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art. The United States Artists Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts have awarded her artist fellowships. Artist Residencies include The Banff Centre, Alberta; Konstfack University, Stockholm; The MacDowell Colony; and the Arts/Industry Residency in Foundry at the Kohler Co./John Michael Kohler Arts Center. An American Craft Council Fellow, Mimlitsch-Gray was named Master of the Medium by the James Renwick Alliance. As Professor and Head of the Metal program at SUNY New Paltz, she received two Chancellor’s Awards from the State University of New York: Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and Excellence in Teaching.

Lola Montes is a multidisciplinary artist whose work consists of painting, sculpture, film, and design. She received her BFA in 2008 from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and is based in Sicily and Milan, Italy. Montes’ practice draws on metaphors from her own mythology. She works with the unconscious to create psychic images of timeless patterns, creating exquisite order. By painting the subject’s spirit, she translates a primitive timelessness into other realities.

Rodger Stevens is an American artist and sculptor whose principal medium is wire. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Rodger studied at the Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York City and is now an internationally exhibited artist with work in numerous private and institutional collections. His work, while abstract, is firmly rooted in a deeply personal narrative and draws heavily upon literature, language, mathematics, human physiology, and day-to-day experience. His hand-crafted sculptural works and wearable pieces embody carefully wrought stories and ideas articulated through composition and form. His attention to line and narrative has led to a body of works that operates like a language of glyphs: aesthetically rich in appearance and conceptually rewarding upon closer inspection.

Sagarika Sundaram graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons / The New School, NY. She studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and at MICA in Baltimore. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and a Senior Fellow at Silver Art Projects in New York City.  Sundaram creates sculptures, relief works, and installations using raw natural fiber and dyes. In 2023, Sundaram’s debut solo show was exhibited at Palo Gallery in New York City, and her work was also shown at the Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, the British Textile Biennial, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, The Armory Show in New York, and at Frieze London with Nature Morte Gallery. In 2024, she will participate in Bronx Calling: The Seventh AIM Biennial at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and an exhibition at Salon94. Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times and ARTnews and featured by PBS and Artnet News.

The 2024 Art + Design Residency installation The Source of Everything, is made possible by generous loans of works by the artists and from 303 Gallery and Vito Schnabel Gallery. Support has been provided by the Sara Little Turnbull Foundation, W.I.L.D. Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, MJS Foundation, the Manitoga Board of Directors & Leadership Circle, and from William Roos & Scott Olsen. List in formation.