New Voices: Rockland’s Next Art Generation

New Voices: Rockland’s Next Art Generation
February 19 – April 1, 2023
Opening Reception: Sunday, February 19, 2pm – 5pm
Free to the Public
Please join Rockland Center for the Arts for New Voices: Rockland’s Next Art Generation, opening Sunday, February 19th from 2-5pm.  During RoCA’s 75th Anniversary, in 2022, it presented Rockland’s Women of South Mountain Road.  These women had achieved national and international notoriety in their various fields.  We are excited to start off our 76th exhibition year by presenting some of the younger talent in Rockland, as part of the next art generation.  Artists are Nina Berlingeri, Joel Blenz, Matt Casanova, Danielle McDonald, Alice Mizrachi, and Nate Singer.
Nina Berlingeri has solidly planted roots in Rockland’s art scene through a 2014 artist residency at the Arts Students League of New York’s Vaclav Vytlacil studios.  She was then awarded the first Edward Hopper House Fellow of Creative Community Outreach for a 2018 artist residency.  Further developing her public youth arts programs, “The Nighthawks” connecting local high school students with artworks, and artists with ways to develop and refine their own creative practice.  Berlingeri was awarded the Emeritus Award for Historic Site Stewardship from the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2018 on behalf of the museum.  Berlingeri’s bold figurative work mirrors her life and the ongoing resonance between her experiences and environment. The deconstruction, distortion, and reinstitution of the figure is regularly evolved through creating a series of multiples- each derived directly from the previous.  This enables the distortion of the form to remain malleable and retain its immediacy.  Her current work has maintained the focus of the figure, most recently through the lens of reflective self-portraits.
Joel Blenz’s abstract, mixed media artworks play with perception.  His work is an examination of the subcultural and natural decayed outdoor surfaces, recreating beautiful textured and blended surfaces into his paintings.  He retains the grime, grit, and detritus of a street aesthetic through his manipulation of surfaces.  A studio practice has allowed for an exploration of an endless amount of layering and drying time in his painting process.  Each piece provides an interactive experience for the viewer.  When walking back and forth in front of the work, colors shift and fade creating an illusion that confounds the viewer.  He is intrigued with the power of messages in public spaces and how advertising has an impact on our psyche.  He consciously makes an effort to create more positivity in this visual landscape by focusing his public art on uplifting and positive messages for the community.  His current work is an ongoing exploration of the ambiguous space that graffiti now occupies as both an outsider art form and a legitimate player in the contemporary world.  Blenz’s current work has been featured in exhibitions for Pop Up MoMA, New York, Gallery Guichard in Chicago, IL, Scope Art Fair and Graffiti Gardens in Miami FL during Art Basel.
Matt Casanovas’ main focus is on the narrative – collecting from folklore, sentimental memories, and present day stories to create a timelessness through unbounded mediums in painting and printmaking.  He pulls the emphatic expressions of both body and sentiment from vintage film promotions as well as stories, and applies them to a contemporary vantage point using materials and techniques of the old masters.  Casanovas has exhibited his work at the Garnerville Art Center, Garnerville, NY, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL and Siragusa Gallery, Chicago, IL
Danielle McDonald uses a process of illustration, a system of collecting, deconstructing and reassembling images or fragments of moments preserved and composed in the mind.  These images are concrete, symbolic and abstracts parts of life.  She plays with scale and perspective to visually imagine the way we prioritize and compose moments in the mind.  Parts of stories and images are weaved together, consciously and subconsciously, helping us to make sense of relating and connecting to others.  McDonald is a public school teacher and community worker.  She has collaborated with schools, shelters, cultural institutions, universities, facilities for incarcerated teens, Groundswell and designed mural walls throughout Philadelphia and New York City, designed sets for Opera Delaware and small independent films.
Alice Mizrachi is a mixed media muralist, fine artist, educator, and curator.  Grounded in deep compassion for the human experience across borders, Mizrachi explores both the spiritual and physical dimensions of being human, and in particular, female.  Mizrachi’s intentions include the empowerment of self and others through artistic expression, as well as advocacy for women, youth, and the environment.  Family, community, and tribe are also recurring themes and are approached as active spaces of shared engagement through her mural making.  Her studio practice has developed into a testing ground for explorations in assemblage, sculpture, and installation that has transformed both her painting practice and her work as a muralist.  Her spontaneous approach to line, and the deconstruction and reconstruction of figurative elements in her assemblage and ceramic sculpture, reveal a human hand in the making of her work, an intentional maneuver in an increasingly technological age.  Mizrachi’s work has been featured in the Museum of the City of New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Albright-Knox Museum.
Nate Singer is a mixed media artists working in ink, paint, sculpture and film.  His interest in organic matter led to an intimate understanding of the underlying systems of embedded geometrics within organic matter. At once energetic and poised, Singer’s abstract paintings and ink drawings use saturated,  hard-edged shaped and intuitive calligraphic marks to create compositions that resemble organic growth while reveling in technical orchestration.  He has exhibited at Garnerville Art Center, Saratoga Arts Center, and Union College with an art residency at Salem Art Works.  He has been awarded a Hilda A. Colish Sculpture Award and a NY6 Think Tank Grant.
Please join Rockland Center for the Arts for New Voices: Rockland’s Next Art Generation.  The exhibit opens with an artist reception on Sunday, Feb. 19th, 2:00pm – 5:00pm.  The exhibit will be on view through April 1st, open Mondays – Saturdays 11am – 4pm, (closed Sundays).  Free to the Public (masks encouraged).  Also on view in Gallery One, Window into Color: Works by Art Gunther, works inspired by the light of the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center and by the realist painter himself.  Art-ifacts: Works by William Rauschenberg on view in Gallery Two.  Rauschenberg uses the lost art of sand casting to create three dimensional puzzle like pieces.  For more information call (845) 358-0877 or visit www.rocklandartcenter.org.
 RoCA gratefully acknowledges support for its programs from The Rea Charitable Trust, ArtsWestchester, Sarah and Stephen Thomas, The Richard Pousette-Dart Foundation, M&T Bank, The M&T Charitable Foundation, The Dorothy Gillespie Foundation, Walter Cain & Paulo Ribeiro, Kantrowitz, Goldhamer & Graifman P.C., QuietEvents, the Estate of Joan Konner, Lighting Services Inc.,, the Mark and Jessie Milano Foundation, Zaklin Family Charitable Fund, The County of Rockland, Art Services Group, RoCA members, donors and business members.
RoCA’s programs are made possible, in part, with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Funding is also made possible by the County of Rockland.