Interplay Artist Talk featuring Deborah Freedman, Janice La Motta and Amy Masters

Please join us at the gallery for a dynamic discussion with Deborah Freedman, Janice La Motta and Amy Masters about their process and the works included in Interplay. The event is free and open to the public on Sunday, May 26, 3-5pm at 1053 Galley at 1053 Main Street in Fleischmanns.

Deborah Freedman is a painter and printmaker whose work explores the tension between nature’s invisible physical force and a painterly, gestural, emotive interpretation. For the past 25 years, she’s been observing and drawing the Ashokan Reservoir and a pond near her home in the Hudson Valley. The collages in this exhibition are an investigation of a dreamlike landscape that is threatened. The pictorial space is warped or disturbed, echoing her disquiet about the instability of the environment—as if there is a hole in the world that needs to be healed. As an artist with monocular vision, this art form assists her in experiencing the water’s physicality in three dimensions. Her works resemble an eye, a geode, a womb, a portal or a bubbling cauldron. Recently she began adding the figure to the work, reclaiming her own body and integrating it into the landscape. The collages are also a reclamation of earlier work as she reuses sections of monoprints and paintings from 20 to 30 years ago.

Janice La Motta is a visual artist with an over forty-year career as a studio artist and arts administrator. She has balanced a career as a practicing artist while serving in the positions of museum curator, artistic director, nonprofit executive director and owner and director of a contemporary fine arts gallery that she ran successfully for eighteen years. 

Since 2020, she has been pursuing her studio practice full time. In October 2023 she returned to her love of gallery work and opened Art Bites Gallery, in High Falls, NY with her partner, artist Simon Draper. She lives and maintains a studio in High Falls, NY.

Amy Masters lives and works in New York City and The Catskills where she has her studio. She is a painter, printmaker and teacher. Her visual work often references the natural surroundings both inside and out and have been an ongoing source of inspiration. As an artist, she has exhibited widely, including New York City, Los Angeles, Maine and upstate New York. She is a founding member of Adhoc Collective, a group of local artists re-visioning the way artists think about and share work with their community. She was an artist-in-residence and a board member of the Heliker-Lohotan Foundation on Great Cranberry Island, Maine.