October 5–November 3, 2024
Bushel is pleased to present “Symbiocene Era: Artists Envision Environmental Symbiosis,” an exhibition guest curated by multimedia artist, activist, and educator Kathleen Sweeney. This show features the work of eleven women artists exploring diverse pathways of integration and collaboration with nature in their artistic output as painters, storytellers, artisans, interdisciplinary artists, found-object sculptors, photographers, and videographers who inhabit the rural area of the Catskills watershed in New York State. They are Sarah Bachinger, Susie Bellamy, Toni Brogan, Sharon Horvath, Christina Hunt Wood, Robin Kahn, Emily Johnston, Rachel Owens, Heather Phelps-Lipton, Christie Scheele, Kathleen Sweeney.
Guest curator Kathleen Sweeney explains: “Symbiocene” takes its root from “Symbiosis,” or ‘living together’ to co-create and envision a world of mutual respect for all living beings, beyond the human-centrism of the Anthropocene Era. The exhibition concept focuses on envisioning a world of collaboration with nature in all aspects of creative revisioning of our relationship to diversity, honoring our homeland, and expanding alliances to protect the ecosystems of the Catskills and beyond. These are artists, solutionists, ecoartivists, and changemakers who are integrating creative practices into deeply engaged environmental awareness, expanding what it means to be responsible creators. This includes questioning their own carbon footprints through creative reuse and art material sourcing while moving out of the studio into community to help co-create a world beyond dystopia and despair.
Please join us for the opening reception of the exhibition on October 5, 4–7 pm; with remarks at 5 pm. And in conjunction with the show, Bushel will host a film screening of “How to Power a City” on Saturday, October 19 and an earth pigment painting workshop by participating artist Emily Johnston on Saturday, October 26.
Artist Bios
As an EcoArtist, Sarah Bachinger is deeply inspired by new materialist and ecofeminist theory and Indigenous/Cultural/Ancestral knowledge(s) as they challenge conventional anthropocentric understandings of the world and instead emphasize the agency and vitality of, and forging kinship with, more-than-human beings. Her practice focuses on (re-)connecting human beings with the natural world by exploring ways to make kin with and nurture interspecies collaborations between art and sciences, communities and the more-than human world. Her mixed media photography installatins focus on blurring, reconfiguring and democratizing the boundaries between disciplines, nature and society, and manifold worlds of humans and more-than-humans. The central impetus of this work is to generate concrete and actionable solutions (now and old) to the planetary and anthropocene crisis.
Susie Sparrow Bellamy is a visual artist and Shamanic Reiki Master Teacher currently getting her masters in Five Element Acupuncture. Susie lived and worked in New York City for over two decades and now resides in Andes, New York where her private practice, Diamond Hollow Healing, is also located. Susie is also the author and creator of Dream Dust Shamanic Tarot, published in 2016, which is based on a series of her abstract paintings. Her painting for the show, “Personal Experience of Non-Aggression” is part of a series of “Dharma Paintings”. Created outdoors in the light of the sun, moon, wind, rain and brushed by the elements; leaves, soil, bugs, and grasses, it is a mirror, “entering into death and exiting into life.” www.susiebellamy.com
Toni Brogan is a New Zealand born, New York-based fiber artist. Interested in creating texture through a “no rules” free form style, her work explores the tactile nature of the woven medium with its limitless possibilities. The Catskill Mountains serve as inspiration and backdrop, with the dramatic changes in seasons a never-ending palette to resource. Her handwoven, hand-dyed pieces repurpose as much natural, foraged, recycled and thrifted fibers as possible. Toni has recently begun spending time in Merida, where the abundance of natural fibers from the Yucatan have inspired a new body of work. Her artworks have been included at Seattle Art Fair, Hawk+Hive Gallery, Field + Supply and Xtant, Mallorca, Spain. https://www.tonibrogan.com/about
Sharon Horvath’s paintings are artifacts that bring together fragments of past, present and future by combining paint, magazine photos, plastic packaging and barnwood planks from her immediate environment. Conglomerates of surfaces, containers, images, and patterns, multi-dimensional “flat sculpture” lean on the wall and spill into our space. Dried out paint palettes leave behind fossil-like polymer strata of dried paint, adhered to flat planks like protruding eyes. Strange arrangements and juxtapositions show jumps and transformations between states of mind and matter. Bardo Boards exist in-between their past lives as trees, then barn walls, and an unknown future of breakdown and reconstitution. Meanwhile, they are adorned, rained on and embellished for temporary display. Horvath’s awards include a Fulbright Research Fellowship to India, a John Simon Memorial Foundation Grant for Painting, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Anonymous was a Woman Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Painting and, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, a Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum, a Mid-Atlantic NEA Regional Fellowship, an Elizabeth Foundation Grant for Painting. Horvath is a Professor of Art in Painting and Drawing at Purchase College, SUNY. https://sharonhorvath.com/
Christina Hunt Wood (she/her) is an African American multimedia artist specializing in assemblage, photography, and time-based media. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Northeast, with notable exhibitions at Bushel Collective (Delhi, NY), Davis Gallery at Hobart & William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY), Maxon Mill at Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), The Torpedo Factory (Alexandria, VA), and The Painting Center (NYC). Christina is a 2022-24 Creatives Rebuild New York AEP Fellow (Mellon Foundation and Tides Institute). In 2021, she received a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant, and in 2019, she was named a “Steward of the Catskills” by the Catskill Center. Christina earned her MFA in Visual Art from Lesley University. “My assemblages are constructed from discarded “road soda” cans collected on rural back roads in upstate NY. Each piece offers evidence of the collective impact of everyday aggressions against the environment and are a metaphor for micro aggressions in general.” https://www.christinahuntwood.com/about
Robin Kahn is a feminist artist committed to expanding the traditional boundaries of art by exploring new strategies for engaging the public. Her commissions range from site-specific projects created for Documenta(13), Kassel; El Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; CAFA Art Museum, Beijing; and The Uruguay Biennial, Montevideo. Her paintings and artist books have been widely exhibited and are included in the collections at MoMA, The Whitney and The Brooklyn Museum in New York , as well as The Smithsonian Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. Kahn is the recipient of several awards including a National Endowment Fellowship for the Arts. Since moving from Manhattan to the Catskills in 2016, Robin Kahn has been collecting crafts and frames made locally and photos and images about the region’s culture recombining them into new mixed media collages that explore her emergent introduction into the mercurial wiles and powerful mysteries of the natural world. https://www.robinkahn.com/
Emily Johnston practices close to the earth. Her work often finds her on her knees by a stream, foraging rocks for the earth pigments she paints with, mixing them with river water. The process is spiritual and rooted in a desire for transformation: of our relationship with the land, and consequently of the cultural forces that threaten Life on our planet. Her work has been exhibited by Picture Room, 1053 Gallery, Bushel Collective, Still House, Ed. Varie, Sad Gallery in Brooklyn, and Galerie Brun L’Eglise in Paris. Most recently, her earth pigment paintings were on view in Tivoli, NY at Weird Specialty, and in 2022 she exhibited a selection from seven years of drawings at Birdsong Community Garden in Delhi, NY. Her images and writing have been published in the journal Documentum, edited by Teju Cole and last year in Producing Humans, by Dr. Iris Cushing. Emily is an American artist raised in Paris and living in the Western Catskills of New York. https://emily-johnston.com/
Rachel Owens is a multimedia artist and professor at SUNY Purchase, living and working in the Hudson Valley NY. Her work investigates the intersections of ecological and social issues using a variety of meaningful materials such as crushed glass and marble dust. Her most recent work, Future Fossils, also incorporates digital technologies to examine deep time. Begun as a visiting researcher in paleontology at the New York State Museum in Albany, it involves 3D scanning of fossils from the world’s oldest known forest, found in Gilboa, NY. 400 million years ago in the Devonian period, a cluster of these trees grew along the Catskill Sea in what is now the Catskill Mountains. The casts are made combining up-cycled broken bottle and jar glass mostly from food and beverage containers. Like stained glass objects, they take on a celestial glow elevating the rocks to their important status as our plant ancestors. When these trees lived, is the moment that the animal kingdom started crawling out of the water and onto land. All of this work and the larger project are meant to have us consider both our importance and also our absolute insignificance within the Earth’s history and trajectory. https://www.rachelowensart.org/
Heather Phelps-Lipton was born in Ithaca, NY and raised by wolves. Be it video, animation, proposed legislation or streetwear, her work circles a common intention — hacking the 21st century condition and revamping the contemporary human operating system. Frequently grounded in photographic observation, Heather’s work uses the mechanisms of capitalism and media to empower projects of disruption and proposed re-creation. Heather is based + works in Delhi, NY. Her single channel video piece, ‘gathering electrons’ is a vertical video mandala exploring a barefoot practice known as earthing. Heather recently completed her BFA at Bard College. https://www.heatherphelpslipton.com
Christie Scheele is a contemporary landscape painter living and working in the Phoenicia area. Her open, atmospheric landscapes have exhibited extensively in the Catskills, mid-Hudson Valley and in national and international galleries, museums and are included in many private collections. Recent works encompasses both landscape paintings and a discussion of climate change and local biodiversity through writing, monoprints, and collaged map and public presentations. She donates of a percentage of sales to local land conservancies and advocacy organizations. For this show, Christie Scheele has selected paintings that reflect the joys and climate challenges of living today in the Catskill Mountains, maintaining her signature open narrative that invites the viewer to bring their own feelings to the experience. https://christiescheele.com/
Kathleen Sweeney (guest curator), is an interdisciplinary artist, storyteller, environmental steward and community weaver. She recently released The Book of Awe: Wandering and Rewilding, a publication of original photography and poetic wonder lore, funded in part by an Individual Artists Grant from the Delaware County Council for the Arts/NYSCA. Video art and photography exhibitions include South by Southwest, Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, LA Center for Digital Art, Atlanta Film Festival, with panels, residencies and presentations at universities, media art centers and residencies at Cill Rialaig Art Center, Ireland; The Mind and Life Institute Europe; and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. An Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement, her courses explore creativity, multimedia storytelling, social change innovation, girl leadership, mindfulness and digital detox literacy. The author of Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age, she has published articles at Afterimage and IndieWire and has been funded by the NEA, NYSCA and Ford Foundation. A native New Yorker and lifelong environmentalist, she recently relocated to the woods of Roxbury, NY where she co-founded Don’t Trash the Catskills. Current artwork incorporates foraged forest materials, photography and video art inspired by the Catskills ecosystem. www.kathleensweeney.com