The Garden 2023
Francine Hunter McGivern
Martine Kaczynski
Rachel Owens
Courtney Puckett
Andy Šlemenda
Barbara Westermann
Opening reception Saturday, July 22, 3–7 PM
ARTISTS ON VIEW IN THE GARDEN
Francine Hunter McGivern
For the last 50 years, Francine Hunter McGivern’s work embraces a range of ideas grounded in a Post-Conceptual practice that includes performance, video, text, multi-media installations, drawing, painting, and sculpture.
In 1989, in the wake of profound personal losses due to the AIDS epidemic, Hunter McGivern closed Jungle Red Studios (1977–1988) in New York City, and moved to Italy. While living in Positano through 1997, the artist became inspired by life on the Amalfi Coast. She experienced a deep transformation amidst the powerful volcanic energy fields. She stopped performing and began to develop a varied and unique vocabulary for creating and framing spaces emerging from ideas referenced in her lifelong study of the hermetic and metaphysics. Through the use of various textural materials, she began to create works in “series” for installation. This process has evolved into her present practice.
Diagnosed with epilepsy at age six, Hunter McGivern began counting interior grids and geometric forms as a simple methodic exercise to perceive and map spatial delineation, thus locating and re-entering her physical form in the spaces between. These out-of-body seizures were the roots of her conscious creative development and have guided her lifelong research into art, philosophy, metaphysics, geometry, and numerology, as germinating ciphers that continue to determine and shape the artist’s practice and process.
Martine Kaczynski
My work re-contextualizes everyday objects we rarely notice, initiating a deeper understanding of their symbolic significance within the means and markers of settlement. The word fence comes from the word defense, and although domesticated by material and design, their ubiquity demonstrates the legacy of fortresses in our modern desire for ownership, privacy, and territory. Estate corner fences mark entranceways and serve no function but one of conspicuous prestige and territorial declaration, yet they are diminutive and feeble: fence facades.
Estate Corners in Yellow and Mauve utilizes signage and color to further abstract this state of architectural and symbolic superficiality. They become second-ordered facades, painted in colors that mock the sentimental urge of personalization and implied status.
Rachel Owens
These sculptures imagine the Garden at Turley Gallery as a cave filled with geological remains from our present. Referencing classical sculpture as well as geology, the works are cast from marble dust and resin, confronting both patriarchy and ecological collapse. Sticking out from the bottom of each candy-colored natural form, are shoes that represent modern power structures including tactical boots, wingtips, and cowboy boots.
The largest work, Column of the Anthropocene, replicates the moment when a stalactite and a stalagmite meet in a cave. This sculpture produced by nature references classical columns from antiquity. In this instance, the dripping from above has enveloped three figures whose feet still protrude. Spreading out from the central work smaller stalagmites are growing from the ground, an imaginary cave ceiling enveloping the feet of the structures that got us here.
Courtney Puckett
Integrating the theories and methodologies of both fine art and craft, I assemble domestic cast-offs such as old furniture, household goods, and textiles. Committed to environmentalism, I source rather than buy materials, save everyday detritus from the landfill and rehabilitate them into abstract, sculptural forms. I am drawn to familiar mass-produced objects without authorship as neutral objects with transformative potential. Examples are clothes drying racks, fan covers, and laundry baskets. I choose textile as a primary material because of its malleability, tactility, and confrontation to the dominant, patriarchal hierarchies of art, specifically sculpture, throughout history.
In an ongoing series of large-scale sculptures, I invent human-sized characters or archetypes with surrogate bodies that represent outwardly facing personas. Found objects serve as armature while repurposed textiles are wrapped, knotted, and sewn onto the surfaces like skin on a skeleton. Inspired by the essential workers of the global pandemic, many works in this series carry titles such as The Gardener, The Caretaker, and The Griever. Assigned tiles suggest occupational or social roles—homespun avatars for a hyper-mediated social world. Functioning as metaphors for engagement, they tend to the earth, to each other, and to their inner lives.
Andy Šlemenda
Hymn/Hiss envisions the transformation of a backwoods vigilante into a genderqueer trickster.
This installation-based performance crosses the bounds of a divided America, blurring class, spiritual traditions, and the freedom of expression. By resurfacing suppressed, gender-nonconforming religious icons, such as the bearded femme: Saint Wilgefortis, Šlemenda refutes the Christian right’s delegitimization of the trans* community. This work continues Šlemenda’s exploration of LGBTQI+ spiritual histories, engaging with contemporary queer practitioners of faith.
The transformation will be set against a stacked hay bale structure. A call and response with the audience in honor of Saint Wilgefortis’ feast day will be led by Reverend Mother Grace Ferris of Saint Wilgefortis Trans Mission, Schenectady, NY, a spiritual home for the trans* community.
Barbara Westermann
Information Architecture Nr 233 consists of five architectural structures built for the purpose of receiving and transmitting information. These receptors stand in for information communications channels, resembling musical instruments or building infrastructure. As an installation, this work situates knowledge in its local environment, as ambient sound, news, information, and intellectual discourse passes to and from, funneling data into thought, action, and perhaps wit or wisdom. Dynamic, evolving, listening, and uttering, it’s a conduit for brainstorming about time and space.
The piece, one in a series of Regional Planning Lab interventions, adopts the vocabulary of minimalist art, using elemental abstract shapes and forms from engineering, seeking out philosophical or poetic contents. It is contemplative, suggestive, and alluring.
Upstate Art Weekend
Friday July 21–Sunday, July 23, 2023
Garden reception Saturday, July 22, 3–7 PM
Andy Šlemenda, Hymn/Hiss, 2023, performance and mixed media installation with Reverend Mother Grace Ferris
Garden reception at Turley Gallery
Saturday, July 22, 3–7 PM
3 PM
Artist discussion with exhibiting artists Martine Kaczynski and Adam Liam Rose led by Joan Grubin
4 PM
Performance by opera singers Sungyeun Kim and Maria Giovanetti
5 PM
Andy Šlemenda, Hymn/Hiss performance and installation featuring Reverend Mother Grace Ferris
6–7 PM
Opening reception for The Garden’s 2023 artists
Installation photography by Spencer House Studio
ABOUT THE GARDEN
The Garden presents outdoor exhibitions and experiences seasonally and on a rolling basis. It is continuously evolving with new creators, installations, and programming including dance, music, and other live performance events. We invite you to visit the Garden during our regular business hours.