By ROBIN CAUDELL
Staff Writer
KEENE VALLEY — Martha Corscaden's "Females on the Fringe" is the inaugural summer exhibition at the Corscaden Barn in Keene Valley.
The she-thing show rocks works by Alice Boardman, Stephanie DeManuelle, Amy Fennelly, Cynthia Gallagher, Julia Gronksi, Lana Lucas and Janet Millstein.
"Most of them have been here at different times over the last few years," Corscaden said. "When I was thinking about putting this show together, they struck me as an interesting, diverse but edgy group. I liked the idea of having an all-women show. Usually, I'm not into that kind of thing, but they're all complex. I wanted to create a sanctuary where women could come and do what they really wanted to do."
'FINGERPLAY'
Stephanie DeManuelle departed from her usual heavy, encrusted, semi-abstract paintings from nature and assembled collages from her cache. After a well-received one-person show in New York City, she wanted to do something materially light.
"I had done collages before," said DeManuelle, who is the chair of the Fine Art Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "They were a lot like my paintings. I did layers, layers and layers."
She has fringed into airy fabric collages made from beautiful ripped silk, lace and drawing paper.
"They're very minimal. I was really delighted. It was just a way of design thinking. This is big. This is little. This is warmish. This is cool. I used some thread. These are things I saved that I was drawn to. I had no idea how I would eventually use it."
Corscaden titled the works, "Fingerplay."
"There are six of them," DeManuelle said. "I hope they're visually pleasurable and give some kind of visual delight. All the elements are there. They are really in a different form. It's almost like sharing a private thought in a way. They're very fragile."
The arrangement of Cynthia Gallagher's installation was up in the air as of this writing but she will rework her notebook made with watercolor, pencil and collage.
"Sometimes, I might have more of one than the other but those are the materials," said Gallagher, who is a Fashion Institute colleague of DeManuelle's. "I'm still working. I still have some pieces just made of fabric. I have small or irregular-shaped watercolors on the wall. They're abstract."
Gallagher was influenced by three trips to India.
"By the colors there, the patterns, the light and surfaces," she said. "That's where they came from."
TORN-PAPER SOULS
Janet Millstein's lithograph "12975" is a boarded-up Tiffany-blue house covered with vines that haunted her.
"A beautiful wreck," said the artist, who studied illustration at Parsons. "I was so intrigued by it. It looked like a house that was beautiful once. Everything in the Adirondacks — a building, mountain or tree — has been a spectator to things that we don't necessarily see. These objects, they watch us, and they see things differently. They may even, sometimes, judge us. I love that this house is standing there — 'I'm still here.' Maybe, someone will claim it again. I just try to capture these things the way they are. I want to give them a life again or a permanent record in case it changes and isn't there."
Millstein's works are lyrically unsettling, as are Lana Lucas's watercolor on paper from her series "The Venus Trap," which exhibited in Manhattan. Two less-sinister, recent works are "Under the Sea" and "If the Stars Were Mine." The "Venus Trap" series includes "White Trumpet," "Deadly Habits" and "Island of Lost Desire."
"It's a carnivorous plant," said the Russian-born Lucas, who also studies clay sculpture at the Bridgeview School of Fine Arts in New York City. "I love the idea that the flowers are very beautiful but very dangerous."
Amy Fennelly's paper collages are also deceptive. From afar, they look like landscape paintings. Upon close examination, works such as "Three Pines," "Spring Snow" and "Swimmers" reveal their torn-paper souls. Trained as a painter, she likes to sift through Smithsonian and Architectural Digest for materials.
"I paint with paper instead of paint," said Fennelly, a Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "Some are allegorical. I work on the theme: interior scenes with windows and doors open to nature. That's my thing — showing the man-made world compared to the natural world. I use a lot of symbolism."
An art history minor, she fuses art, religion and architecture. Her landscapes were inspired by the Adirondacks, where she relocated a decade ago.
"Someone recently told me I tell stories by using images that don't relate to each other but somehow I tell a story by relating them to each other," Fennelly said.
Alice Boardman's vibrant photo collages such as "Tropical Starlings" and Julia Gronski's ceramic "Hares" round out "Females on the Fringe."
E-mail Robin Caudell at: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com
