I’ll always remember the amazing corner studio in Yonkers where artist Catherine Latson creates her nature-inspired art.
We featured the artist last summer, visiting her in her spacious, light-filled studio, one of the YoHo Artist Studios at the Alexander Smith Carpet Mills Building.
The whole building is just a hotbed of creativity – and that’s being proven once again at another Yonkers site.
Through Nov. 1 Latson and six of her fellow YoHo Artists are joining with the Hudson River Museum to present “Gothic Glenview.”
Inspired by the museum’s Glenview mansion and its Victorian décor, these artists have filled the onetime home’s rooms with seasonally appropriate installations related to the Victorian era’s “Cult of Mourning.”
Here, the YoHo artists have created artworks that, as press materials share, “ruminate on the idea of death, and, more universally, on the subject of loss and its enduring link to the experience of being human.”
Latson, a Tarrytown resident, sent us a few photographs of her work and that of a few of her fellow artists to give a glimpse into “Gothic Glenview.”
Here’s how the museum is describing a few of the works:
- In the Ebony Library, Catherine Latson’s “Dancing With Death” presents a feathered gown layered with patterns, textures and colors that echo the Victorian decorative style and colors of Glenview’s interior. Though the gown can be worn, it drapes an unmoving mannequin, mutely expressing its story, a ghost of the past. Latson said, “If I were going to dance with death, this is what I would wear.”
- Alison Collins, in “Temps Perdu,” covers the walls of Glenview’s Dining Room in muslin painted with words from French novelist Marcel Proust’s “À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu” (“Remembrances of Things Past”). She colored the words with a dye gathered from the rust of her own decaying sculptures. The rust testifies to beauty made from transformed fragments of the past as well as time’s ability to alter man’s creations carelessly.
- Gary Moran created the skeletal “Fish Ghost,” glowing from backlit film, and two ink-jet prints, “Fish Sentinels.” The fish represent the fish of the Hudson River, which have sustained so many people and return as protectors in this season that presages the death that is winter, to remind us that we are all part of the circle of life.
The other featured artists include John Bruton, Alexa Grace, Deer Moses and Adam Shultz.
I know my interest has been piqued – how about you?
For more, visit hrm.org or YoHo Artists on Facebook.
– Mary Shustack
