Upstate Gnarly
A show of 4 artists:
Gracelee Lawrence / Brian Wood
Courtney Puckett / Ashley Garrett
in Ashley Garrett & Brian Wood’s Studio
Upstate Art Weekend
July 19-21, 2024
12-6pm
Closing Reception Sunday, 8/18 1-6pm
Upstate Gnarly is an exhibition of sculpture and painting in Brian Wood & Ashley Garrett’s studio, a 4,000 square foot space. Two painters are paired with two sculptors - Brian Wood with Gracelee Lawrence & Ashley Garrett with Courtney Puckett.
The conversations between the works span gestural, philosophical, emotional, and visionary spaces. All four artists’ works have a generative, unfolding quality as if arising from some underlying logic or deep structural order that lies just out of sight - like the drive toward emergent structures in nature. Created in the shimmering rural landscape of the Hudson Valley, each artist handles presence and memory, scale and complexity, with unique and powerful vision.
Upstate Art Weekend Offers a Year’s Worth of Art in Four Days, The New York Times, by Will Heinrich
For a hectic straight line that will take you back toward the city, start at “Upstate Gnarly,” a group show of work by two painters and two sculptors, all of it color-driven, intuitive, and complicated — or “gnarly” — held in the shared studio of Brian Wood and Ashley Garrett. READ MORE
In Conversation with Ashley Garrett
Ashley Garrett was kind enough to host us in her East Chatham studio space, which she shares with her husband, artist Brian Wood. Her body of work spans different scales, mediums, and approaches to abstraction, while being intimately connected to the landscapes of the Hudson Valley and her hometown in Pennsylvania. It is bold, aetherial, and earthy, and - one might say, the epitome of Upstate Gnarly, the title of the group show on view in their open studio during Upstate Art Weekend. READ MORE
Must-see Events During Upstate Art Weekend, Times Union, by Matt Moment
At their luminous 4,000-square-foot studio in East Chatham, married painters Ashley Garrett and Brian Wood will stage a double dialogue between painting and sculpture made in the Hudson Valley. READ MORE
Upstate Art Weekend 2024 Recap: Another Dose of Art Overload, Chronogram, by Taliesin Thomas
A pretty drive down Route 9 to East Chatham brought me up a steep hill to land upon one of the most gorgeous studios anywhere in the world and the exhibition “Upstate Gnarly”, featuring sensual, surrealist-inspired paintings and bright sculptures by Gracelee Lawrence, Brian Wood, Courtney Puckett, and Ashley Garrett. READ MORE
The fifth edition of Upstate Art Weekend includes over 145 participants and spans ten counties from the Hudson Valley to the Catskill Mountains. READ MORE
Gracelee Lawrence. As if a Bridge Could Close the Rift, 2022, 3D printed UV resin, pearl pigment
Brian Wood. Mana, 2021, oil on canvas, 12 x 10 inches
Gracelee Lawrence “…is going mostly for shine and bright, artificial colors, used singly or in multiples, thanks to variegated threads. The resulting pieces seem enveloped in shiny gift-wrap ribbon. They can be mouthwatering…This is a great show, to which my initial reaction was, for some reason, “Take that, Jeff Koons.”
-ROBERTA SMITH, THE NEW YORK TIMES
More about Gracelee
Brian Wood “…creates a kind of Symbolist world in which emerging into life and being devoured by it are part of the same inexorable process. As in the early work by Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove, the erotic and the spiritual are of a piece.”
-HOLLAND COTTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES
More about Brian
Ashley Garrett. Spira, 2023, oil on canvas, 77.75 x 59.75 inches
Courtney Puckett. The Arrowmancer, 2024, found objects, repurposed textiles, 72 x 42 x 35 inches
Ashley Garrett’s paintings "…through their swirling forms, capricious brushstrokes, and passages of brilliant light, capture the vibrant forces of nature. It is as if the forests in which Artemis hunted or the seas which wrecked Odysseus’s ship are given agency in Garrett’s work and begin to tell their own tales of turmoil and splendor.”
—ROBERT R. SHANE, THE BROOKLYN RAIL
More about Ashley
Courtney Puckett’s work “…occupies a space among countless artists in its use of craft materials like yarn, scrap fabric and tinsel. Puckett takes this a step further…her classical approach to the figure lending fresh significance to epics like Homer’s Odyssey, in which Penelope uses weaving to manipulate her patriarchal destiny.”
-KRISTEN FREDERICKSON, CURATOR
More about Courtney
Brian Wood
Gracelee Lawrence
Courtney Puckett
Ashley Garrett
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Brian Wood is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum, Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art, Ludwig Museum, National Gallery of Canada, LA County Museum, Houston Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, and many others.
Wood has had 50 solo shows in international galleries and museums and more than 200 group shows including at MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, Walker Art Center, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of American Art in DC, LA County Museum, Houston Museum of Art, Seibu Museum Tokyo, “Documenta” in Germany, American Academy of Arts & Letters, NYC, and many others.
His awards include the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, NYFA & NEA Fellowships, many Canada Council Grants, American Academy of Arts Purchase Award, and 2019 finalist for the Rome Prize.
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Gracelee’s work explores relationships between food, the body, and technology, residing in the intersection of physical and digital reality. Their art examines how bodies are gendered and fragmented through capitalist desires, physical sustenance, and digital spaces.
Gracelee (they/she) has participated in twenty residencies globally and had their second solo show at Postmasters, New York, in June 2022, praised by Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Currently, they are the Head of Sculpture Area at the University at Albany, SUNY. Recent exhibitions include Peter Gaugy (Vienna), PRIOR Art Space (Barcelona), and Kavi Gupta (Chicago). Gracelee has installed outdoor sculptures at locations such as Wave Hill (Bronx) and Franconia Sculpture Park (Minnesota). They were a Visiting Professor at Chiang Mai University on a Luce Scholars Fellowship and are a member of MATERIAL GIRLS. Beyond art, Gracelee is an avid dancer, lifelong equestrian, and dedicated gardener.
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Courtney Puckett (b. Winter Park, FL) is a Hudson Valley-based visual artist. She earned a BFA from MICA, MFA from Hunter College, and studied in Aix-en-Provence, France, Glasgow School of Art, and the University of New Mexico. Solo exhibitions include Spring Break Art Show (NY), Furnace (CT), Hesse Flatow (NY), and Flecker Gallery at Suffolk County Community College (NY). Group exhibitions include the Schneider Museum of Art, (OR), Museum of Contemporary Art, Arlington (VA), Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz (NY), NADA x Foreland (NY), Geary Contemporary (NY), White Columns (online), and BRICArts (NY). Artist Residencies include Yaddo (NY), Saltonstall Foundation (NY), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (ME), LMCC Workspace (NY), full fellowship Vermont Studio Center (VT), and a community research grant through River Valley Arts Collective.
Puckett is an Assistant Professor of Art at CT State Northwestern and has taught at FIT, Parsons, and Pratt. From 2019-2022 she ran the backyard art space White Rock Center for Sculptural Arts with her artist-musician husband Colin O’Con and their rescue dog Penelope.
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Ashley Garrett’s paintings explore nature as a conduit to spiritual experience. Garrett received her BFA from the School of Visual Art in 2008. Solo exhibitions include SEPTEMBER Gallery (Kinderhook & Hudson, NY), Gold / Scopophilia Gallery (Montclair, NJ), and Hood Gallery (Brooklyn, NY).
Group exhibitions include Katonah Museum of Art (Katonah, NY), Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), COL Gallery (San Francisco, CA), NURTUREart (Brooklyn, NY), Turley Gallery, (Hudson, NY); Cross Contemporary Art, (Saugerties, NY), Berkshire Botanical Garden Leonhardt Gallery, (Stockbridge, MA), Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, (Woodstock, NY), Tappeto Volante, (Brooklyn, NY), and LouiseNevelson Chapel, St Peter’s Church, (New York, NY), among others.
Her work has been reviewed in Two Coats of Paint, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Spiel, Caesura Magazine, Dovetail Magazine, and She Performs. Garrett also collaborates with poets including Billie Chernicoff, Tamas Panitz, Robert Kelly, George Quasha, and Lila Dunlap.
Artists’ websites:
Ashley Garrett & Brian Wood’s studio in East Chatham, NY, near conservation areas in Red Rock and Beebe Hill State Forest
We are located off I-90 where County Route 24 and County Route 5 meet.
Click below for directions: