Joshua Harmon and Jane Heidgerd Garrick

January 20, 2007 at 2pm
The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue, Kingston, NY

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at
http://www.rfpaints.com/

Joshua Harmon’s poetry has appeared recently in Colorado Review, Columbia, Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Gulf Coast, LIT, Slope, Sonora Review, Verse, and Volt. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such journals as Agni, Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Witness. His first novel, Quinnehtukqut, is forthcoming in summer 2007 from Starcherone Books. He has received fellowships in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Joshua currently lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he teaches at Vassar College. He blogs at: http://joshuaharmon.blogspot.com/

You can see his work:

http://www.slope.org/archive/issue18/index.php?file=poetry_harmon.htm

http://www.arts.gov/features/Writers/Harmon.html

http://thediagram.com/5_5/harmon.html

Jane Heidgerd Garrick’s work has appeared in First Intensity, Hudson Valley Magazine, Bullhead Books, Riverdreams, and Chronogram. She has also completed a novella entitled The Seas of West Virginia. She received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College. In 1995, she worked with Scenic Hudson to create Poets’ Walk in Red Hook, NY and continues to coordinate poetry readings there. In 2001 she received the Gort Foundation Award for Poetry from the National Arts Club, and in 2002 she collaborated and performed with Robert Kelly at Scenic Hudson’s annual gala. Jane is a longtime resident of the Hudson Valley.

Check out Poet's Walk at http://www.scenichudson.org/parks/shparks/poetswalk/index.html

In the Gallery at R&F:

The artists featured in the Gallery at R&F’s show Give and Take draw on symbolism, borrowed from history, and allude to merging cultures and an exchange of values. The show will run through January 27, 2007.

Kim Bruce’s ongoing autobiographical series is an examination of the contradictions she experienced being raised in a catholic household during the 50's at the height of the women's movement. Her works analyze the mixed messages she received while growing up in a value system that was reinforced by a formative catholic education. The work is motivated by the challenge of being self-sufficient in a society and church system that encouraged dependency and subjugation. Bruce creates constructions that are plied with images and other elements to form assemblages that make succinct yet subjective statements and find bittersweet contradictions that reference the dichotomies that exist within the church, the world and ourselves. Kim Bruce lives and works in Redwood Meadows, Alberta, Canada.

Valerie Hammond is a portraitist that captures her subject in the outline of gestures made with their hands. She then fills the silhouetted forms with materials collected from forests, fields and gardens, creating mixed media drawings that marry fauna and ferns with images of the body. These drawings reflect the unique expressiveness of individual hands while revealing tracings of the spirit. Hammond unearths the deep-rooted connection between our bodies and the earth; the way things deteriorate and are reborn. "By focusing on remnants and traces she creates a physical reliquary representing our ancestors and our lives in flux." -Kiki Smith. Valerie Hammond lives and works in Germantown and Manhattan.

Judith Kindler’s series, "Surface" is inspired by the worn down and vandalized walls of Venetian buildings photographed during a recent trip. Many of the images speak to cultural ambivalences; those contradictions that happen when a word of graffiti, like "assassin," happens to fall next to an embedded shrine of Mary and the Child. These deliberate and accidental combinations of things, words and emotions that are played out over time on these surfaces, became a wellspring for Kindler, who began introducing the photograps into mixed media paintings with encaustics and oils. By inscribing her own markings on the surface of the wax, she becomes a contributor to the history of these wonderful surfaces. Judith Kindler lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

John Maul uses the Greek cross in many of his works, not so much as a symbol of the orthodox church, but to represent organized religion in general. Taking a minimalist approach to these loaded icons, Maul asks us to think about why a simple form can produce such powerful emotions independent of any rational context. Stripping away all secondary associations, Maul puts us in direct touch with the source of our memories, invoking the most universal passions through the sparest means. "I selected the Greek cross over the Latin cross for both design considerations and its resemblance to the x, a symbol of negation. Many modern religious groups will condemn or hold judgments against those who dont subscribe to their philosophies. To me, this translates to simple bigotry and intolerance." John Maul lives and works in Corvallis, Oregon, where he is presently a Professor and Chair of the Department of Art at OSU.