Each issue of The Collaborative magazine features a piece by a local, or locally exhibiting, artist.
If you have an original piece of artwork you would like to submit for the gallery page, email kcusack@proctors.org.
Issue 1 – February 2019
Oil on canvas, 78 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Danese/Corey, New York
“Big Pink” was featured in the spring 2019 “Like Sugar” exhibit at The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.
Issue 2 – March 2019
Sharpie fine point on moleskin
Courtesy of the artist
THE ARTIST: Alex Foster, also known as @doodles_for_sanity on Instagram, is a local illustrator and musician who uses art to cope with anxiety. Through his art, Foster advocates for the destigmatization of mental health issues.
“I draw when I have anxiety or stress and use the images to focus my mind and pull me out of less than favorable conditions. I heighten my mood with a really good linear shading and take any lingering thoughts in my mind and play them in contrast with simple black and white line drawings,” Foster told The Collaborative.
“I would say the motivation is to rid myself of the feeling that a balloon is being blown up inside my head and it’s filled with anything and everything that could possibly go wrong. Being able to put a pen to paper is in a sense a deflation of that pressure.”
Issue 3 – April 2019
44 x 44” Giclee print on German etching paper.
Courtesy of Shani Crowe and the Opalka Gallery.
THE ARTIST: Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Shani Crowe focuses on cultural coiffure and beauty ritual in relation to the African diaspora and the way these practices foster connectivity. Her work and performances have been used on “Saturday Night Live” in collaboration with Solange Knowles and exhibited at SoHo House in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary African and Diasporan Art (MoCADA) in Brooklyn and the Broad in Los Angeles, among others.
THE WORK: “Cerebral” is part of Crowe’s “Braids” project, for which she is most known. “Braids” consists of large photographic portraits capturing the artist’s intricate, corn-rowed hairstyle creations.
Issue 4 – May 2019
THE ARTIST: Albany artist Jade Warrick (TrashKiD) is a digital illustrator and painter known for depictions of cultural trends and characters in colorful, often comical, reimaginings. Check out more work from TrashKiD at @trashkid_art on Instagram.
THE WORK: “Beyond Rosie” is a free, feminist coloring book featuring female liberators and activists, with short bios and quotes inspired by what the artist observed as a “a concerning lack of non-male cultural icons, especially LGBTQ+ and people of color.”
“I believe knowing about these women is important, and it’s especially important to place it in a format that is fluid with young teens to adults. We are in an age where we want to see the facts at a glance, and I believe a coloring book can make this subject matter fun and educational without feeling tiresome,” Warrick says of the project.
Issue 5 – June 2019
Fuji 3000b film print. Courtesy of the artist.
THE ARTIST: Troy photographer Adam Putnam’s work explores the personalities of communities “on the fringe” around the Capital Region and North Country through photo stories. His focus, he says, “explores the less glamorous aspects of our environment creating an emotional narrative and a historical record for subjects that could otherwise be overlooked.”
THE WORK: “American Spirit” is a photo story documenting Lake George in the off-season. The full photo story can be found on his site.
“During the spring in Lake George, the village is still somewhat of a ghost town, locals only,” Putnam says. “The off season in these summer colonies is arguably just as magical as the height of the summer tourist season, for different, perhaps more bizarre, reasons. The town is quiet and empty. Pools, wood carved statues and hotel signs are still covered up in heavy plastic, protecting them from the harsh winter elements. Residents are just beginning to open up the store fronts and sweep off the porches. The mini golf courses and arcades are starting to receive applications from first-time job seekers. The neon lights are beginning to warm up and flicker as the lake is starting to thaw along with the campground floors.”
Issue 6 – July 2019
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THE ARTIST: Troy artist Tony Nastasi grew up in the Adirondacks where she was inspired by the nuance and delicacy of her rural surroundings. The subjects in her delicate drawings are particularly detailed and carefully arranged. Nastasi’s work has been exhibited in shows at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz where she earned her BFA and The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls. Recently, Nastasi illustrated album art for the Troy band Blue Ranger’s vinyl release of Saving a Beauty. See more of Nastasi’s art on her Instagram account: @toninastasi
THE WORK: “The subjects exist less as a body than as a shadow, or collection of dust, reminiscent of dreams and repressed memories,” Nastasi explains. “The delicacy of my work creates a type of stillness present in the wake of loss: stillness in which even the smallest breath, a sigh, can shift surroundings. My drawings exist as intimate moments that hang in the uncertainty of their own fleeting physicality.”
This particular arrangement of the individual pieces of artwork was suggested by The Collaborative and approved by the artist.
Issue 7 – August 2019
Watercolor and pearlescence on bristol. Courtesy of the artist.
THE ARTIST: Local artist David Gerard studied painting and photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In addition, he is an ambient composer and musician, releasing 22 albums of original music as ambientism—found on Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon and Spotify—and has often used his work in designing album covers for his catalog.
THE WORK: “My artistic style (of painting) would be defined as abstract watercolor. It’s a style I developed in the late ‘80s. This particular piece combines watercolor with a pearlescent pigment—a gift given to me from my friend, Thomas Legbandt,” Gerard says. “I don’t really ‘conceptualize’ my watercolor paintings, which is why I decided that they all be numbered and untitled. I don’t want any personal influences which might detract the viewer from making their own interpretations about the pieces.”
The piece was exhibited in the Bethlehem Public Library during October 2019.
Issue 8 – September 2019
40’’ x 60’’ acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
THE ARTIST: Originally from San Francisco, artist Virginia Bryant has been living and creating in Troy since 2015. She draws from fabric design processes such as mechanical drafting, rorschach line drips, silkscreen and shibori for her painting. Her style is heavily influenced by her early ballet training and experience as a dancer, performer and choreographer.
THE WORK: “This work continues explorations of musical contrapuntal patterning with an expansion of space,” Bryant says. “[It’s a] return to improvisational automatic drawing and the purely lyric mark making of recent years.” This piece was shown in Bryant’s “Fuges and Preludes” exhibit at the Eclipse Gallery in North Adams, Mass. in October 2019.
Issue 9 – October 2019
Digital art world-building from experimental video game. Courtesy of the artist.
THE ARTIST: Brooklyn-by-Troy multimedia artist Evan-Daniel Rose González works in music/sound art (performing as Silica Angel), painting, 3D and game design. The main themes of his focus are the blending of sonic and visual textures to create intricate, complex, evolving environments. “Thematically, my work loosely centers around Latinxfuturism and mental health, though more so that’s a product of the context in which it was created; based on my lived experiences,” he says. “I’m not sure if it would be possible for me to create art that doesn’t tie back to those central themes.”
Stay updated with González and find him on Instagram: @silicaangel
THE WORK: “This current project, an experimental game for PlayStation 4, is the manifestation of a decade-and-a-half long dream,” González says. “My history as far as playing games goes is pretty shallow and scattered—I’ve always created more than I’ve consumed artistically, because whenever I consume art I like for too long without making anything I get extremely anxious. I played ‘Final Fantasy 8’ as a preteen in the early 2000s and I have been trying to achieve the moods and emotions it elicited in me, to varying degrees, in most art I have created since. In retrospect, a lot of those feelings were awe and intrigue amplified by childhood hyperbole, and likely have less to do with the game itself than they do the time in my life I was playing it. My longest practiced discipline is music/sound design, and my introduction to that world was directly inspired by my desire to score games. It has always been a dream of mine to use audio and sound as one component of a larger interactive environment tying all of my disciplines together in a way that makes sense. This current project is the manifestation of that dream.”
Issue 10 – November 2019
Film still. Courtesy of the artist.
THE ARTIST: Joseph Gietl is a writer and director from Albany. “A Void” is his second film in collaboration with APB Films and West Field Films. “My movies tend to be symbolic with dream-like imagery and feature strange characters and existential threats,” he says of his work.
Gietl’s first film “Museum” won an award for best cinematography in San Francisco and aired on WMHT’s “TV FILM” series this summer and the Adirondack Film Festival in October.
THE WORK: “A Void” is a non linear story of a grieving couple struggling to survive after the death of their young child Max ( Sencere Daughtry). The husband Paul ( Mu Shaka Benson) begins to feel his wife Vera ( Kristin Noriega) drifting away from him toward an unseen force created in her lab. In this scene we see Vera in a crowd of people watching an unusual performance art piece play out with great anticipation.
“A Void” is slated for release in early 2020.
Issue 11 – December 2019
Cut-paper collage. Courtesy of the artist.
THE ARTIST: Troy artist Niki Haynes is a collector and archivist of printed material whose work “reveals a concentration of gleaning, sifting and cataloging.” Having grown up in Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1960s and ‘70s with her mother, contrasted with the years spent with her father on a commune without running water or electricity in the Colorado mountains, Haynes’ work is reflective of the “radical, mind-expanding culture of artists juxtaposed with the realities of poverty and the basic needs of everyday living.”
THE WORK: “Controlled Substance” is a piece featured in Haynes’ “Culture Consumed” series. The body of work, spanning 15 years, aims to acknowledge our cultural obsession with consumerism, brand loyalty and concentrated advertising. “Controlled Substance” is on display at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls through Dec. 4 as part of the Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region exhibition.