November 2 - 27, 2022

Opening Reception: Friday, November 4, 6-8 pm

Daniel Feldman
“Photo-Synthesis”

Cynthia Roberts
“Mutualism”

Daniel Feldman
“Photo-Synthesis”

“Fragile, astute image
entering into the day that ended in us”
—From In una città lontana (In a Distant City), Salvatore Quasimodo

When I was just out of college, I worked for a few years for a well-known abstract painter. This artist used to say, “My work is about everything.” I was silently dubious. It seemed too much to ask of a work and too much to ask of a person engaging with a work.

On some level, of course, it turns out that anything is about everything. But that may not be so helpful when it comes to works of art. Nevertheless, I do believe artworks can reach very far in what they engage and in whom and how they touch.

Most of my works from the past several years are composed of segments. Each has a foundation in photographic images I shoot, and Photoshop is the medium, giving me a set of tools that in many ways transcends the freedom that oil painting gave me for many years. The segments participate in conversation with the wide-ranging history of mark-making on two-dimensional surfaces. I’m fascinated by the combination, juxtaposition, and clashing of different types of visual space — both painterly and photographic — and the attendant implications of those.

In each multi-segment work, the parts are together for reasons that often may seem anything but obvious and defy ready explanation and translation away from the visual. The relationships between segments arise from my experience of them, usually over a very long time, watching carefully what happens visually, conceptually, and emotionally when segments are placed next to or near others. Many of the segments have taken long, circuitous paths to arrive where and how you see them here.

Each of these works has been a source of surprise and astonishment for me. I hope your encounter with them results in experiences that similarly fascinate, challenge, and open up new spaces for you.

Cynthia Roberts
“Mutualism”

On my mind is the relationship we have to others, both in community and within our expanded human ecosystems. Parallel to those emotional property lines, are the integrated relationships happening between many life forms outside of humans. 

Mutualism: (noun) the doctrine that mutual dependence is necessary to social well-being
Biology: symbiosis that is beneficial to both organisms involved

The works here reflect the interdependence of life forms. I use a gray line as a way to depict these forms as interchangeable in their meaning, but as drawings and in their ecosystems, they are highly specific and articulated as such. The forms are immersed in and emerge from washes of saturated color. The smaller paintings emphasize the extraction of these specific elements for examination, and then immerse them back into the depths of paint as a proxy for ocean, for air, for that which surrounds them.

Mutualism is a description of how I see our moment in time as humans, and the challenge to observe this moment and act if we choose. 

Hudson Falls, NY

September 2022