Bethany Ides and Christina Mengert

Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 2pm

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

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website.

Bethany Ides makes work that interprets functions inherent to language. Ides’ solo, text-based video, performance and installation pieces have been presented at The Brooklyn Museum and PS122 in New York as well as in galleries across the Pacific Northwest. In 2010, Ides presented an evening-length opera, Children Get Stuck Places Underground, at Half/Dozen Gallery and an eponymous monograph is forthcoming from H/D Editions. Her 2009 multi-phasic project, APPROX L, was enacted incrementally before culminating as an expansive, 3-room treatise on the evasiveness of proper names (in particular: Lindsay) at Worksound Gallery in Portland, OR. Approximate L, a chapbook-length prose poem which initiated the project was published by Cosa Nostra Editions in 2009. As curator, Ides co-directed the Gilded Pony Performance Festival in Troy and Valley Falls, NY in 2006 and recently developed a program on radical nostalgia as part of the Alembic guest-curated series at Performance Works NW, called The Third Side. Ides served as founding editor of FO (A) RM, an interdisciplinary journal of arts and research from 2002 – 2006. Currently based in Brooklyn, NY, Ides (formerly Wright) teaches art theory & history as well as the literature of sacred text at School of Visual Art.

Christina Mengert is the author of As We Are Sung (Burning Deck, 2011) and co-editor of 12x12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa Press). She has co-written a few feature films shot in the Hudson Valley area in the past two years. From time to time she teaches and/or advises for Bard's Prison Initiative Program.

In the Gallery at R&F:

Anne Surprenant's show, Out of the Blue, opens on Saturday, December 3rd, 2011 from 5-7pm. The exhibit runs through January 19th, 2012.

In her most recent work, Anne Surprenant explores the ways in which we experience distance. That is, the kind of experience that is almost imperceptible [discreet] and then very suddenly and overtly upon someone, somewhere. Surprenant uses Drone aircraft to embody this 'hanging in the balance'; push a button in Vegas and the impact is felt halfway around the world. The void between an action taken in a small dark room and its implication is revealed on a small blue screen. The depictions of these new American Beauties; the Drone float on the pictures surface as inertly as do the images on the nightly news. Perhaps they inform us in some way but at best serve to embolden us to believe in an experience which is not our own.