Experimentation, camaraderie at ChaNorth

PINE PLAINS — During a month-long stay at the artists’ residency venue called ChaNorth, a division of the broader ChaShaMa organization, eight artists created worlds within the unique studios they were assigned to in a large farmhouse or one of several outbuildings.

ChaNorth Artists eat communally—“I always try to include a couple of cooking artists in the monthly mix”, said residence director Brigitta Varadi—weed McEnroe’s vegetable garden once a week in exchange for organic vegetables, and enjoy nature and solitude and time unobstructed by work and family commitments.

Valery Jung Estabrook’s video installation art, “My Hands are Medicine,” is rooted in video, but more as a light source now, with abstraction coming into it as images extend into space. In her tiny ChaNorth studio, images of her mother and herself appear on layers of mesh like theater scrims, with voices overlaid, to enact ritual healing gestures for the artist’s father, who died in 2017.

Working in video for almost 20 years, Estabrook seeks for digital film, which is essentially information, a way to “bring that into the world as material,” as in this immersive installation in which one is invited to walk between and behind the scrims and experience the effects of reflective material hung on the walls.

Melinda Kiefer and Christopher Santiago are a married couple—she runs an art high school and he is a professor of anthropology and sociology—who not only collaborate but actually complete many works together. Their collaboration predates their relationship and continues to develop in new directions. “It’s interesting when we are allowed to collide on a canvas…the juxtaposition of the different styles…,” Santiago mused. The couple also work in poetry, sculpture and drawing performance.

Interdisciplinary artist Christy O’Connor called ChaNorth “an amazing experience.” She has been creating elements for use in installations and performances, such as one in which she had herself covered in jewels by audience members, a nod to a fictitious scandal involving Marie Antoinette, who is also featured in paintings thickly embellished using cake-piping tools.

Canadian-born Leslie Fandrich, who is now a U.S. resident, translates her own collages into large, low-relief textile assemblages. “I’m often thinking of two things being true at the same time… a paradox, which could be how colors blend together, hard and soft, and so on,” she explained. Her dual nationality, gender identity, and the push-pull of parenting—having responsibility yet granting freedom—are reflected in the works.

Having driven from Ohio with her printers, Claude glasses and other appurtenances, photographer Mary Ann Carothers has made discoveries specific to our region while exploring art venues with the ChaNorth group—trading the Ohio River for the Hudson, for example. A notable piece is her installation of hanging roots as resting places for spongy moths cast into porcelain: “I had to dip them several times before firing them in the kiln.”

With a chuckle, she admitted to “arguing ourselves as invasive species.” Carothers is a design, urban art and photography professor at the University of Louisville.

Derra McWilliams—a teaching artist at a Chicago children’s hospital, albeit in different mediums—creates crocheted portraits inspired by “a brief obsession with crochet in the fourth grade” and resulting in pliable, nearly abstract and very tactile faces.

New England artist Cate Solari’s “collaborative play” interactive project setup, in the farmhouse’s sunroom studio, invites gallery-goers to suspend adult inhibitions around “dirt” and to use elegantly crafted ceramic spheres to leave their mark(s).

Three more groups of artists will be showing their work at open studios at ChaNorth  from 1 to 4 p.m. on the Saturdays of Sept. 2 and Nov. 11, and on Sunday, Oct. 1.  For info, see www.chanorth.com