2025 Programming
THE HUDSON EYE PRESENTS
Now in its sixth season, Upstate Arts Weekend is a connective annual series of public and private events which celebrate the cultural vibrancy of Upstate New York.
RECESS:
Incantations
As part of this year’s program which runs July 17-21, Twin Barns at the Staats House will transform to feature the work of four mid-career artists working across a variety of mediums.
“Incantations” will feature painting, sculpture and site specific work set in a bucolic Hudson River landscape.
David Becker
In his large-scale paintings and works on paper, David Becker riffs on twentieth-century Modernist trends like Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical Painting, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism, transposing these aesthetic idioms into a twenty-first century visual language that reflects an idiosyncratic and unique vision. The hybrid forms that are central to his compositions appear at once machinelike and human as theymerge, morph, and reemerge as something otherworldly yet wholly familiar. Becker concisely captures a moment of transmogrification.
David Becker attended California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC), in Oakland, the Central School of Art and Design Holborn in London and received his BFA from San Francisco State University. Following graduation he attended The Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York. His work has most recently been exhibited at TSL Hudson, Private Public Gallery and George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco.
John Cleater
John Cleater’s work blurs the threshold between physical and virtual space using a range of technologies to alter, enhance or confuse spatial experience. His smooth castings of altered everyday fixtures in chrome and enamel elevate the experience of a household fixture to surrealist modernism, defying the notion of utility, begging the question “why isn’t all junk turned into art?”.
Cleater received his Masters degree in Architecture from Columbia University. He is a founding member of the international performance group The Builders Association and has exhibited his work at The Clermont Historic Site, CR10, Nicole Fiacco Gallery, Thompson Giroux Gallery and Incident Report.
Dan Devine
Dan Devine is a contemporary artist whose sculpture, installations, drawings and photographs explore the relationship between interior and exterior spaces. His work investigates reversals of space to examine our relationship to technology and nature. As a former motocross racer, Devine combines a fascination for vehicles and machines parts with a reverence for the natural world. Notable projects include his inside-out cars, sheep farm and concrete castings formed in the space between crashed vehicles.
He is Chair of the Sculpture Department at Hofstra University where he was also the Director of the Rosenberg Gallery for over twenty years. For over four decades, his work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums and has been reviewed in major publications. He lives and works in Columbia County, NY.
Marie Lorenz
New York-based artist Marie Lorenz’s work is rooted in the exploration and narrative of New York City’s waterfronts. Combining psycho-geographic exploration with highly crafted, material forms, Lorenz uses boats to create an uncertain space and bring about a heightened awareness of place. In 2005, she started her Tide and Current Taxi project, taking people around the New York Harbor in a boat built from salvaged materials, using the tide to guide her navigation.
Solo exhibitions include Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, Waterways, at the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, Vermont; Tide and Current Taxi, at the Rib Gallery in Rotterdam; and Graybelt, a multimedia project funded by the Bridging Barriers research initiative, at the University of Texas in Austin. She is the recipient of many awards and residencies, including the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Lorenz received an MFA from Yale.