Lynn Behrendt and Rachel Levitsky

Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at http://www.rfpaints.com/

Lynn Behrendt is the author of chapbooks The Moon As Chance, Characters, Tinder, and Luminous Flux. A full length collection, petals, emblems, is due out from Lunar Chandelier in 2010. She co-edits the Annandale Dream Gazette, an online repository for poets' dreams.

Rachel Levitsky’s second book, NEIGHBOR, is newly released by Ugly Duckling Presse (2009). Her first full length volume, Under the Sun, was published by Futurepoem books in 2003. With Jan Lauwereyns she is currently guest editing DWB, in the 2010 issue of the Dutch language magazine, “The Empire of Women.” Online, you can read her poems, prose and essays at Puppy Flowers, Sous Rature, and How2. In 1999, she started Belladonna*, a multi-faceted feminist avant-garde writing confluence. This past September, she moved into a house in Saugerties, NY.

Elizabeth Bryant and Max Winter

Saturday, October 17, 2009 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at: http://www.rfpaints.com/

Elizabeth Bryant is a writer living in Red Hook, NY. She edits Defeffable and co-curates the Bard Roving Reading series. Her most current publications include a chapbook, Fluorescence Buzz (Dusie, 2009), and a new full-length serial piece, (nevertheless enjoyment... (Quale Press, 2010). She has new writing in Wheelhouse, and upcoming in Coconut.

Max Winter's The Pictures was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2007. He has also published poems in New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Boulevard, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. His reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, Bookforum, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. He has been a Poetry Editor of Fence Magazine since 2001.

In the Gallery at R&F:

Hendrik Dijk's show So Far, So Close, October 3rd - November 14th, 2009

Hendrik Dijk’s work is about energy. He is a colorist who will use form, find and create for the purpose of letting colors have a life of their own. Dijk thinks that colors are like humans; each one is unique and likes to have good neighbors. Therefore, even though his work is often chromatically pronounced, he always asks himself if each color harmonizes with neighboring colors. Born in Oostmahorn, Friesland, Netherlands, Hendrik Dijk moved to the USA in 1983. Since 1986, he has lived in Kingston, NY and teaches art at Kingston High School. He has made six murals for the City of Kingston in city parks. Dijk’s present creative efforts go mainly into painting and photography. He is a co-founder of the Arts Society of Kingston and the Kingston Biennial Sculpture Show.

Don Byrd and Chris Piuma

Saturday, September 19, 2009 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at http://www.rfpaints.com/

Don Byrd lives in Albany, NY, and teaches at the State University. His publications include Aesop's Garden, Charles Olson's Maximus, Technics of Travel, The Great Dime Store Centennial, and The Poetics of the Common Knowledge. In the mid-1990s, having decided that something had gone terribly wrong, and for the most part, quit publishing. He has been working intently on a writing of ambiguous genre during these many years. It is entitled "Abstraction." It is now nearing completion. Thousands of pages have been written and most of them filed away, some on electronic media that would now be hard access.

Chris Piuma is thinking about nouniness. Chris Piuma has had a few chapbooks published, but they're out of print, so you can't have any. Chris Piuma wishes it weren't so hot out. Chris Piuma just added a new post on his poety blog, Buggeryville, at: http://www.buggeryville.blogspot.com/ Chris Piuma is accustomed to the third person. Chris Piuma and how grammar enables affective connections with the dead. Chris Piuma misses Portland and co-organizing the Spare Room poetry series, but enjoys Toronto and grad school. Chris Piuma is learning yet another language! Chris Piuma remembers when life provided cocktail party anecdotes, but now it's all Facebook status updates.

In the Gallery at R&F:

Russell Thurston's show Deus Ex Machina, August 1st -September 19th, 2009. Thurston describes his painting process as a journey without a map. He considers every painting an experiment, and also a collaboration between his own ideas and the perceived will of the painting. At times unsure what direction the work will take, Thurston accepts that in this process, accidents often happen. Parts get covered up; hidden, then scraped off; perhaps revealing something new. The beeswax medium moves in unexpected ways. Thus, working like a scientist, the artist uses the process of painting to better understand the nature of things.

Thurston’s latest mixed-media and encaustic work combines roofing tar and other building materials such as foil tape, nylon mesh and tar paper. He in interested in endowing these materials with a beauty and aesthetic resonance that transcends their functionality.

Russell Thurston was born in Norman, Oklahoma and grew up in Southern California. He received a B.F.A. from California State University, Fullerton, and an M.F.A. from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Russell has worked as freelance illustrator & photographer for 20 years. The artist currently lives in Santa Fe with his wife, Gretchen, a freelance writer, and their son, Max. Thurston’s’ work is represented in Santa Fe at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, and in Chicago at wag artworks.

Stay tuned...

January 16, 2010
Dorothy Albertini, Nancy Huth and Sam Truitt

February 20, 2010
Basil King and India Radfar

March 20, 2010
TBA

April 17, 2010
TBA

Annandale Dream Gazette

Some believe the dream comes from the gods. Some believe that the dream comes from the ancestors. Some believe that dreams come from a part of the dreamer’s self usually remote or removed from consciousness. Some believe that dreams are scraps of memory and fantasy, remnants of the day. All of these beliefs are probably true enough in their ways, and certainly all have been productive of creative and analytic results. Scriptures and assassinations, benzene rings and orphic odes arise from dreams.

What if the dream is something else as well? Not individual, not a message from God or from the archetypes or from the soul. We hear Freudians speak of the language of dream, but what if dream is language, is language the way language is language: systematic, intentional, focused on saying something. What if dream is above all, exactly as language is, social. This is the aspect of the dream that is seldom considered, dream as arising from the speaking back into a community, a community of native dreamers (so to say).

It was to examine the idea that a dream seeks an intended audience outside the dreamer, that the Annandale Dream Gazette was founded years ago. The dreamer dreams towards someone—and that someone is within the community. Thus two goals are achieved by harvesting the night’s dreams and publishing them: the dream may find its intended hearer, and we may gradually come to learn the nature and shape of the community itself, the community into which one dreams.

So: the dream is public. The dream is social. The dream is communication. The dream intends to speak to you. These are the notions to investigate.

—Robert Kelly

http://www.annandaledreamgazetteonline.blogspot.com/

Lee Ann Brown and Charles Stein

Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at http://www.rfpaints.com/



Lee Ann Brown is the author of Polyverse and The Sleep That Changed Everything. She teaches poetry at St. John's University in New York City where she is active in poetry, and lives summers in Marshall, NC, outside of Asheville. A cycle of her song-poems is available at PENNSOUND, under the title "The 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time." She will be reading from new work, and singing some very old songs.

Charles Stein is the author of many books of poetry including The Hat Rack Tree from Station Hill Press. His most recent publication is a new verse translation of The Odyssey from North Atlantic Books. He also recently co-authored, with George Quasha, An Art of Limina / Gary Hill (Ediciones Poligrafa).

In the Gallery at R&F:

An encaustic installation by Mimi Czajka Graminski, from April 4th - May 30th, 2009

Mimi Czajka Graminski is known for creating large-scale, delicate installations and sculptures out of translucent materials, such as mesh, tissue and paper. For her installation at the Gallery at R&F, the artist decided to strip away the translucent veil in order to get down to the bare essentials. The Spaces Between is a project composed of small wax dots applied directly to the gallery wall in order to highlight points in space. Like stars, cells, atomic particles and birds flying in formation, these points are defined by the spaces between them, which delineate and give meaning to the images they represent.

The artists’ inspiration comes from nature, the female form and the subconscious. Spending time in nature observing its forms, structures and themes, Mimi Czajka Graminski applies these influences to a study of the figure, drawing on the shapes and curves of the female body and its attire, bringing to her work an interest in the ideas of feminism, femininity, and where the two intersect at a place of both power and fragility. She is also influenced by the subconscious, gleaning ideas from her dreams and waking musings. She translates these inspirations and ideas into formal structures, which are reflective of their origin.

Graminski received her formal art education at Bard College, Annandale, NY and holds a degree in International Studies from the College of St. Rose, Albany, NY. Her work has been featured in many group shows in the Hudson Valley and beyond over the past ten years, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, Islip Art Museum, Katonah Art Museum, and the Albany Institute of History and Art. Most recently, her work was featured in “For the Love of Art” at the Hat Factory in Peekskill, through which her work was highlighted in the New York Times. Graminski was one of 66 artists from across New York State chosen for the New York Foundation for the Arts MARK program, and presented her work at Exit Art in New York City in association with the program. Mimi Czajka Graminski lives and works in Red Hook.

Anne Gorrick, Jill Magi and Christian Peet

Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at http://www.rfpaints.com/

Anne Gorrick’s work has been published in many journals including: American Letters and Commentary, the Cortland Review, Dislocate, eratio, Fence, Gutcult, No Tell Motel, Otoliths, the Seneca Review, Sulfur, and word for/word. Her work has appeared in several anthologies including: The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, (No Tell Press, 2006), Homage to Vallejo (Greenhouse Review Press, 2006), and Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers (Codhill Press, 2007). Collaborating with artist Cynthia Winika, she produced a limited edition artists’ book “Swans, the ice,” she said with grants from the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. Her first book, Kyotologic, is available from Shearsman Books (Exeter, UK). She also curates this reading series.

Jill Magi's text-image works include the book Threads (Futurepoem 2007), the forthcoming chapbooks Poetry Barn Barn! (2nd Avenue) and From the Body Project (Felt Press). Other books of poetry include Torchwood (Shearsman 2008) and Cadastral Map (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs 2005), and inclusions in Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia 2008), Fiction from the Brooklyn Rail (Hanging Loose 2006), and the forthcoming Eco-language Reader (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). Jill's visual work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery, online at Hilda Magazine, Apexart, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Open Studios where she was writer-in-residence from 2006-2007. She teaches at Eugene Lang, Goddard, and The City College Center for Worker Education. You can view her homepage at http://sites.google.com/site/jillmagi/.

Christian Peet is the author of Big American Trip (Shearsman Books, 2009) and two chapbook-installments of an ongoing cross-genre project, The Nines. “Book 1” of The Nines (Palm Press) is available through Small Press Distribution. “Book 2” is forthcoming from Interbirth Books. His work appears in the anthology, A Best Of Fence: The First Nine Years, as well as in journals such as Action Yes, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, and SleepingFish, among others. He lives in Vermont, where he runs Tarpaulin Sky Press and splits a lot of wood. Please visit his website at http://www.christianpeet.com/

In the Gallery at R&F:

More Sense Data an exhibition of paintings by Stephen Niccholls, February 7th - March 21st, 2009.

The paintings of Stephen Niccolls diagram a series of actions – he begins by making a gesture or form, and then responds to it somehow, maybe even by canceling it out and creating a void. And then he responds to the void by contradicting it, echoing its’ form, or harmonizing with it. These voids thus develop into central themes as the artist maps out his personal process of interacting with the world through his work. The accretion of forms and qualities in Niccolls’ work is like a record of a long conversation. Reflecting on an intuitive understanding of the processes of life, including organization, metabolism, responsiveness, movements, and reproduction, this new body of paintings seeks to understand life in a non-linear way.

Stephen Niccolls was born in Texas in 1949, to a family of ranchers. He studied and practiced visual art early in life, but began formal training in the 1970's, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1997 he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Since that time he has exhibited his paintings in a variety of settings around the United States. He has taught art courses and lectured in Massachusetts, France, Minnesota, New Hampshire and New York. Mr. Niccolls currently lives in Kingston, New York and teaches at Marist College in nearby Poughkeepsie. Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon, New York represents him.