December 3 – December 19: Jenny Pope and Scott VanGaasbeck

Jenny Pope lives part time in Ithaca, NY and part time in her car traveling to art festivals around the country. Her research interests include invasive animals, global warming band-aids, bird migration myths, islands and all things extinct and endangered. She is currently working on a picture book about the history of starlings from the UK to the US and how they became an invasive animal.

Scott VanGaasbeck: In the 21st century, making clay pots by hand, using local materials, without electricity requires an explanation. I feel that the tools we use, the things we touch every day as we work and eat, can profoundly affect our relationship with the earth and with each other. I want my pottery to be a connection: between me and my land when I dig the clay I use for my glazes, between you and your food, between you and me as you support my livelihood and a tradition of fine craftsmanship. All of this, I think, is much too important to leave to machines.

Come join us for the opening of our final show!

Friday, December 4 / 5-8 PM

November 5 – November 28: Victoria Boynton and Marney Lieberman

Contraptions

We met once a week for a year, carved out time so that we could collaborate. We couldn’t have produced the book without the physical presence of the other. We knew it was possible to collaborate long-distance, but this book was not made that way, could not have been. On our evenings together, we talked about difficult content and responded to one another without interruption. We worked; then one of us would say “what you got?” The writing was raw, confusing, challenging for both of us. Sometimes it sounded like an argument among mean spirits. Sometimes clearer, gentler, funnier. We talked about what the words were pointing to—the nature of the mind as a contraption, how human intimacy is often at the mercy of that contraption. We laughed about the way the mind will #%*! you if you think about it.

We hauled our project and tools around with us last year: Vicki stored her spiral notebook and pencils for the raw word-work in her laptop bag, which she took wherever she went. Marney used a wooden crate to carry her work and tools, a portable workshop like a clown car. Amazing how much the crate contains: jars of glue and water, tins of pencils, scissors and brushes, baskets of paper and images from our partners’ burn piles and recycling bins.

We practiced being with each other and with the content of the project as each of us took up our tools, kept each other company as we traced our dark hearts and our light hearts and practiced welcoming whatever came. Some sessions went better than others, but we helped each other remember our rules: tell the truth no matter how it sounds, don’t give up, don’t make excuses.

Opening Reception: Friday, November 6 / 5-8 PM

August 6 – August 29: Laurel Guy

Two Hundred Seventy Degrees: Panoramic Views from Mount Pleasant

Mount Pleasant. It feels like the top of the world. The Cornell observatory is there, a reminder that maybe you really can see forever. Katy Payne once said you can only know two or three places really well…I thought I would take some time this summer getting to know Mount Pleasant. Come see what I saw.

Laurel Guy – Plein Air Pastels
Because I work outdoors on location, I tend to choose perfect days when the day itself seems to tell you stop everything and come look closer at the world. A blue sky day when the air is crisp, the light is shimmering. All of us should listen to that call, because perfect days are like a string of pearls…a precious treasure.

Opening Reception: Friday, August 7 / 5-8 PM

July 2 – August 1: Margaret Strother

Works from Nature, 1997 – 2009

Heade Magnolias, 2000 - 2004

A fresh arrival to Ithaca, Margaret Strother comes to The Upstairs Gallery having exhibited extensively across the United States and Israel, where she founded the renowned artist-run exhibition space, Gallery Alfred, in Tel Aviv in 2005. In her work, Margaret combines dynamic brushwork with fine detail to generate evocative images that are both modern and classical. Throughout her long career, Margaret has produced hundreds of still life and still-life-related works, and this show collects many of them together for the first time.

To see more of her work, please visit www.alfredgallery.com/margaret.

Persian Lemon, 2003

June 4 – 27: Everything is a Map!

Ben Marlan, Alice Muhlback & Werner Sun

 

Everything is a map – your tracks from the house to the grocery store, where and why you walked and turned down different streets or cut through a yard and whose yard it was, what time of day and how long the whole trip took. Did you avoid the house with the barking dog, pick a mulberry off a tree? . . . It can all be charted and graphed with symbols and a key to represent different but possibly repeated items and actions. Is time a map? Are your thoughts a map?

You are invited to follow our directions through these interactive and interrelated art-maps using keys to unlock certain representations of place, commentary and self explanation, never losing sight of the humor and wit embedded within. A multimedia show of “artography”, where zooming out or in might just be the way to see where the beginning ends, and where the end begins.

The Artists:

Werner Sun is a physicist and self-trained artist who builds sculptures that move in the wind.  His mobiles are composed not only of the objects themselves, but also the air around them.  Look closely before they fly away.

Benjamin Marlan is a secret agent pretending to be an artist so people will take him seriously.  his whereabouts are unknown, even when he’s in the room.  He isn’t a great cook, but just put a nice cookbook on his amazon.com wishlist (maybe you want to buy him a present, or maybe not…).  Benjiman can be found to make almost any variety of artwork although is mostly doing either miniature landscapes, or large abstracts.  He loves being a part of Spirit & Kitsch.  and will let you know that.  Peace…

Alice Muhlback is not a physicist, nor a secret agent. At least, not yet. Currently she is living the life of an artist.  She is the creator of Spirit and Kitsch. The “Everything is a Map” show is a collaboration of  three Spirit and Kitsch artists. What more could she wish for?

May 1 – May 31: Paul Colucci & Tim Merrick

Paul Colucci

Paul Coluuci’s work rest in an intermediate state between sculpture and functional object. His pieces appear at once foreign and strangely familiar. Form follows function in this show of sculptural objects. The function of the work is to stimulate the imagination and arouse curiosity, awakening in the viewer the urge to explore and become a participant. This visual, as well as tactile experience of handling the objects, whic are hand crafted from aged wood, steel and stone, further enhance a sense of time, history and ritual.

Tim Merrick

Tim Merrick’s hard ground etchings of farmhouses, barns, and birds are etched on salvaged roofing cooper. Tim’s use of expressive line work combined with negative space evokes the passage of time in the rural countryside.

April Show: Kumi Korf’s “Prints and Books”

About the Artist

Stream, Blue Rock, 2008. Aquatint, spit-bite aquatint, and sugar-lift aquatint on akatogashi paper

In the artist’s words, “I am a product of my time, influenced by 20th century European/American masters, but also by a 17th century Japanese master, Koetsu. The technique of intaglio printmaking I use is age-old, not so different from Rembrandt and Goya. ‘Art makes art,’ as H. Peter Kahn used to say. The land and seasons of the Ithaca area became my conscious/unconscious subject matter.”

Opening reception for Kumi Korf will be held Friday, April 3, 5 – 8pm at the Upstairs Gallery.

Visit Kumi’s website at www.kumikorf.com.

March Artist: James Spitznagel

Metromorphose: An Exhibition of Digital Fine Art Photography

March 5 to March 29, 2009

James Spitznagel’s futuristic digital images borrow scenes from everyday life and distort them to the point that they are no longer recognizable.

Once described by novelist J. Robert Lennon as “making the ordinary seem alien and alienation seem ordinary,” James Spitznagel’s futuristic digital images borrow scenes from everyday life and distort them to the point that they are no longer recognizable.  His photographic works are edited and modified through computer imaging techniques and employ a restricted palette, slick sense of geometry and pixilated rhythmic movement.  Although seemingly cool and removed, Spitznagel’s Zen-like works are rich in emotional and personal content.  Each photographic element, distorted in color and shape, originates as a found object, chosen by the artist for his particular reaction to it at a precise moment in time.  Through the screen of the computer, Spitznagel then engages in an ultra-modern form of Abstract Expressionism, using gradients, cropping tools and high resolutions to illustrate the emotions the Action Painters once illustrated through paint and canvas.

Artist and musician James Spitznagel was born in Pittsburgh, PA and has spent the past 15 years living and working in Ithaca, New York.

Website: www.levelgreen.com/art

Upcoming Artist: Nancy Maas

"Sunset Sails" by Nancy Maas

Nancy Maas will be displaying her work in the gallery from Jan 22 until Mar 1, 2009.

Nancy paints both in her studio and plein aire in upstate New York, northern Michigan and the American Southwest, and during extensive travels abroad.  She is recognized for her watercolor weavings, based on an innovative process she developed over the past twenty years. Subject matter tends to be more generalized than her traditional watercolors and allows her to experiment with issues of movement, texture and color.  Nancy’s weavings and other work have been featured in American Artist (1998), Watercolor (1996, 2003) as well as Traverse Magazine (2003), Life in the Finger Lakes (2006) and Coastal Living (2005).