Back and Forth, Between Names: An exhibition about bodies of water

Name: Back and Forth, Between Names: An exhibition about bodies of water
Start: 2024-07-06T16:00:00-04:00
End: 2024-07-06T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Ann Street Gallery

Schedule

Sat Jul 06 2024 at 04:00 pm to 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Ann Street Gallery | Newburgh, NY

Ann Street Gallery is thrilled to present our summer 2024 exhibition and programming!
Opening July 6 with a reception 4-7pm:
Back and Forth, Between Names:
An exhibition
about bodies
of water
July 6 - August 25, 2024
Free & Open to the public
Saturdays & Sundays 1:00 - 5:00 pm
& by appointment
Opening Reception
Saturday July 6, 4:00 - 7:00 pm
Extended hours for Upstate Art Weekend
Friday July 19 - Sunday July 21, 12:00 - 5:00 pm
Programming:
August 18 — performance by Koyoltzintli
August 24 — performance of Glacier Elegy Newburgh by Jaanika Peerna
(Other programming to be announced)
The exhibition is curated by Alison McNulty and includes works by:
Rachel Olivia Berg
Eliza Evans
Matt Frieburghaus
Carmen Lizardo
Koyoltzintli
Renana Neuman
Lauren Rosenthal McManus
Valerie Piraino
Jaanika Peerna
Adie Russell
Suzy Sureck
Back and Forth, Between Names explores the pervious boundaries and shifting identities of bodies comprised of water. Works across media invite viewers to consider water as material, collaborator, place, and metaphor, communicating water’s agency and animacy in its fluidity and similitude between human and nonhuman bodies. Engaging the poetics of water, the exhibition seeks places where language loosens its grip on the knowable, conjuring bodies in, of, and as water.
The works on display reference or index the artists’ embodied experiences of waters within and between continents from the Mahicannituck/Hudson River, the coast of the Dominican Republic, the coast of Ecuador and the Andes, the Global South, the Arctic, and elsewhere in the form of rivers, lakes, ponds, oceans, glaciers, and waterfalls. The artists open spaces of abstraction, reframed boundaries, and reclamation by investigating watery phenomena like tides, fog, waves, osmosis, crossings, submersion, dripping, freezing, melting, floating, eroding, and dissolving. The invitation to question what water carries, returns, and undoes allows discrete, namable identities and the borders between entities to drift, cycle, and dissipate.
The porous edges that shape bodies of water speak to mutuality, responsibility, and healing within a broader field of relations. The artists contend with the physical challenges of changing states of matter, bodies in constant flux and motion, and gravity, as well as personal and ancestral traumas related to water, colonial legacies of partial or unrecorded histories, contemporary migration and climate catastrophes. Works of sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, collage, photography, and video incorporate media such as ice, plants, clay, rock-based pigment, hair extensions, rope, cut paper, charcoal, water-based media, 3D and 2D prints, sound, and projections. Back and forth, holding the necessity, tragedy, and beauty of bodies of water, these artists’ practices move between immersing and gathering, observing and listening, playing and mourning, responding and remembering.