Artists Shine in Upstate Art Weekend

DELAWARE COUNTY — Part of the Upstate Art Weekend, Michele Araujo, Larry Greenberg, Adam Simon, Jude Tallichet and Mark Tribe exhibited recent work in an immense gallery and studio space. Owned by Michele and Adam, it’s a barn once used to store hay on a former dairy farm located at 386 Taylor Road in Stamford. With its creaking wood floors and soaring ceiling that conjured a sense of being inside an overturned galleon, the venue was part of the experience, and made for a unique showcase of five artists working across different media and exploring themes both formal and conceptual.  

Michele Araujo's abstract works combine painting and collage; slashes of neon-bright color on wallpaper layered with torn parts of images from other media, movie stills and academic studies. “There’s a meaning there and sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to do with it,” the artist said about her choice of images to incorporate in her work, “you don’t have to over-identify that in order to have a valuable experience of a piece of art.” 

Larry Greenberg displayed a set of painted objects that were deceptively simple. He explained, “This was done for a show I curated at my studio in Bushwick about the color black, and I came to the idea of how many ways I could make a square.” Mounted on the wall in a horizontal line, the eight pieces are only painted in differing shades of black: “each one reflects light a different way,” the artist noted. While most provide the illusion of a three-dimensional box, one is a solid form of the “blackest black” and appears almost like hole in the wall that an observer could reach into. “There’s a sense of it being a void, but also of it creating a surface.” 

Adam Simon makes paintings utilize stencils of well-known corporate logos, combining their shapes to into forms that are both abstract and recognizable. “To me, they’re landscape paintings. The contemporary landscape that we inhabit, and that inhabits us. The iconography of our times,” he explained. Combining well-worn logos like CBS and McDonalds with more contemporary examples like Bitcoin and Spotify, he states that “yes, there’s critique of capitalism, but I also love these images, I find them very compelling and they belong to all of us, a global language.”

Jude Tallichet’s wall-mounted sculptures are molded from tissue paper and a glue used to bind books, especially appropriate considering her subject matter: a distorted view of a tumbled bookshelf, brightly colored and whimsical. “I’m trying to make a piece that is very temporal and impermanent. For so long I was working with bronze and casting metal and just wanted to move away from the language of the monumental. I took a mold of a bookshelf that collapsed at my apartment in Queens, and used that to create this more chaotic view.” It speaks to her evolving artistic practice, moving into ephemeral materials that provide “room for accident, or improvisation, or change. That kind of freedom of movement is what I like.”

Mark Tribe's paintings and multimedia works explore the natural world in ways that are more deeply personal than they first appear, and also engage with the dizzyingly rapid advances in our technological lives. Two works featured wooded landscapes, actually black and white photographs that have been overpainted to fill them with color, and in frames that look like vintage wood but have been 3D printed. “It looks like a 19th Century Hudson River school landscape painting, but they have this conversation with the digital age, and reflects my own fears about the disappearing wilderness.” A video piece, shot in the woods of the Catskills and featuring the artist’s own voice describing what he’s experiencing in that moment, “is a bit of a turn for me. I’ve been making art for a long time, but I’ve never been in the work myself,” Mark said. “A lot of my work is very planned and deliberate, here I’m being more spontaneous,” and noted that the piece looks at our compulsion to share our experiences, and the act of making art. For another large, evocative piece, the artist has fed his nature photography into AI, printed the results in large scale and layered his own abstract painting on top. “The experience was different from using any other tool I’d ever used…even though you know it’s not conscious, and not sentient, yet, it can feel that way sometimes. As an artist, I think it’s really going to change what it feels like to be human.”