Reb Livingston and George Quasha

April 19, 2008 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paint
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested.

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

Reb Livingston is the author Your Ten Favorite Words - http://www.yourtenfavoritewords.com/ - (Coconut Books 2007) and co-editor of The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second Floor - http://www.notellbooks.org/secondfloor - (No Tell Books 2007). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2006, The American Poetry Review, Caffeine Destiny and other publications. She's the poetry editor of No Tell Motel - http://www.notellmotel.org/ - and publisher of No Tell Books - http://notellbooks.org/

Visit Reb's blog at: http://cacklingjackal.blogspot.com/

George Quasha is an artist and poet who works across mediums to explore principles in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and performance. Solo exhibitions of his axial stones and axial drawings include the Baumgartner Gallery in New York (Chelsea), the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, and at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. This work is featured in the recently published book, Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance, Foreword by Carter Ratcliff (North Atlantic Books: Berkeley, 2006).

For his video installation work art is: Speaking Portraits (in the performative indicative), he has recorded over 600 artists, poets, and composers (in 10 countries and 20 languages) saying what in their view art is. This ongoing work (“art is/music is/poetry is”) has been exhibited at the Snite Museum of Art (University of Notre Dame), at White Box in Chelsea, at the Samuel Dorsky Museum (SUNY New Paltz), and in several other countries (including France and India), and has been featured in several biennials (Wroclaw, Poland; Geneva, Switzerland; Kingston, New York). Further extensions of this work in speaking portraiture include "myth is” and “peace is.” His other work in axial video (including Pulp Friction, Axial Objects, Verbal Objects, Axial Landscapes) has appeared internationally in museums, galleries, schools, and biennials. A 30-year performance collaboration (video/language/sound) continues with Gary Hill and Charles Stein.

In 2006 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in video art.

His other 14 books include poetry: Somapoetics, Giving the Lily Back Her Hands, Ainu Dreams (with Chie Hasegawa), and Preverbs [forthcoming]; anthologies: America a Prophecy [with Jerome Rothenberg], Open Poetry [with Ronald Gross], An Active Anthology [with Susan Quasha], The Station Hill Blanchot Reader [with Charles Stein]); and writing on art: Gary Hill: Language Willing, with Charles Stein: Tall Ships, HanD HearD/liminal objects, Viewer. A new book on Gary Hill is forthcoming from Ediciones Poligrafa (Barcelona), also in collaboration with Charles Stein.

Awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry. He has taught at Stony Brook University (SUNY), Bard College, New School University (Graduate Anthropology Department), and Naropa University. With Susan Quasha he is founder/publisher of Barrytown/Station Hill Press in Barrytown, New York.

In the Gallery at R&F: "Rituals", a solo exhibition of recent encaustic paintings by New Orleans artist, Mary Jane Parker. The show will run from April 5th through May 24th, 2008.

Mary Jane Parker is fascinated by the many intrinsic similarities between the natural world and the human body. The root system of a plant, for example, serves a purpose similar to that of the human intestine, and a satellite picture showing the amazing complexity and mystery of distant galaxies resembles a miscroscopic image of our blood cells. Parkers’ work explores these natural affinities, drawing attention to the unity that exists between our humanity and the world we inhabit. Informed by references from history, medicine and botany, Parker explores her fascination with rituals and ways that we order nature - "from the innocent clover chain to stones that hold a message for the dead", Parker merges the distant and foreign with the intimate and familiar.

Mary Jane Parker lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she is part of the visual art faculty of the prestigeous NOCCA/Riverfront school. She has been actively exhibiting her work since the late 1980’s, though this will be her first solo exhibition in the Northeast. Parker has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors for her work, the most recent being a 2007 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Her work is represented by Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans.