PRESS RELEASE

Found
Exhibition Celebrating Conservation and Community
Curated by
ANDREA COTE
July 25- August 29, 2009
Opening Reception July 25 5-7PM
at
art sites
651 West Main Street (Route 25), Riverhead, New York 11901 T: 631- 591-2401
http://www.artsitesgallery.com
Gallery Hours: Thursday –Sunday, 12-5 PM.

The urgency of conservation, waste, and renewal takes artistic form in the upcoming exhibition Found at Art Sites Gallery in Riverhead, NY, bringing together eight contemporary artists with overlapping interests in ecology, resourcefulness and community. Whether collected from curbsides, dumpsters, lunch trays, flea markets or from the artist's studio floor, objects once discarded and overlooked gain new value through transformation into works of art.

Matt Bua, Julie Peppito and Maire Kennedy juxtapose materials to reveal tensions -- between the natural and the manmade, the city and suburbia, class and culture -- creating a record of our desires, obsessions and excesses. Tara Parsons andCharles Butterly invite engagement with environmental and societal concerns through positive interventions. Twentieth-century art movements such as Assemblage, Surrealism, and Arte Povera are revisited and updated by Pablo Cano, Craig Kane, and Pierre Cote. All these artists share a capacity to express humor, poetry and greatness through humble means.

The works include installation, collage, puppetry and outdoor sculpture. The exhibition will include many pieces realized on site and created for the show. Several make use of Art Sites' expansive riverside property. Artist talks, a video screening, and a variety of community events and workshops will be featured throughout the show’s 5-week duration. Crafts made from recycled materials by artisans from the Fair Trade Market in Hampton Bays and by Blanca Ricardo of East Hampton will be available for purchase. A catalog created by the curator Andrea Cote, a local artist based in Flanders, will accompany and document the show. One installation will invite public participation, drawing stories from area residents.

ARTISTS:

Matt Bua, founder of b-Home, a property in the Catskills housing site-specific visionary structures, and whose project “Cribs To Cribbage” is currently on display at Mass MOCA, will be building a recycled "crate house" on site. The structure, a pavilion in the shape of the North and South Forks of Long Island, will house a creative display of local history, lore, and urban legends collected by way of an open call to the community.

Charles Butterly, whose styrofoam ice bergs and shopping-cart bird houses were recently on view during the Peekskill Project, will be creating a sculpture on the grounds that will biodegrade over time as well as a live performance.

Pablo Cano's work has delighted children and adults in presentations of his avant-garde marionettes and plays commissioned annually for the past ten years by the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. "Found" will feature several of the artist's puppets created from recycled materials. There will be a special screening of a documentary recently produced about the artist giving insight into his work and creative process.

Pierre Cote is a local artist based in Flanders and the curator's husband, whose ingenuity inspired this exhibition. He dissembles and seamlessly recombines discarded objects, juxtaposing the awkward and graceful, the obsolete and the visionary, always with a sly formal humor.

Craig Kane’s constructions of small objects and words blink from within the walls and cast surprising shadows, revealing the extraordinary in the familiar. Following solo installations at Spacecraft Gallery and Point Loma University in San Diego, at Art Sites Craig will create his vignettes onsite, responding to the unique gallery space as well as the other artists’ works.

Maire Kennedy creates natural forms from unnatural products. Her elegant large-scale sculptures made from hundreds of plastic spoons and drinking bottles transcend their seeming simplicity. Previous exhibitions include the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and The Rochester Contemporary.

Tara Parsons engages the public in the creative process while addressing social issues. Her recent project “Not Without a Trace,” a partnership with the Audubon Society and the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, presented at Grand Central Station on Earth Day, invited the public to draw flocks of endangered birds on the street in chalk.

Julie Peppito, a NYFA Sculpture Fellow and Andy Warhol Foundation Grant recipient, creates densely layered mixed-media drawings and sculptures that echo the abundance and excesses of contemporary society. Working with cast off collectibles and plastic trinkets, her aim is "to make the awful and corrupt delicious again."

Andrea Cote co-curated “Posing” at Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Art Center with Joelle Jensen in September 2007. Her artwork has been exhibited at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Islip Art Museum, Delaware Art Museum, The Rotunda Gallery, Solar, and PanAmerican Art Projects.

Sponsors: Crozier Long Island, Kevin Freitas, Art as Authority, Suzanne Egan, Gorson Design Group