North Fork Contemporary, a group founded in 2023 by a group of artists excited about the synergies happening now in the local arts community, embarked in February on a conversation series that the group hopes will inspire the public to see the world through artists’ eyes.
The first conversation, titled “Beneath The Surface,” expanded on an idea moderator Barbara Horowitz first heard from the recently deceased filmmaker David Lynch: “I learned that just beneath the surface, there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew as a kid but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness and blue skies and flowers, but another force, a wild, pain and decay, also accompanies everything.”
That quote was the jumping off point for a the Feb. 22 discussion, between artists Anne Sherwood Pundyk, Allan Wexler, Marianne Weil, Darlene Charneco and Bill Morrison.
Anne Sherwood Pundyk’s unstretched canvases “explode with luminous color, an inviting veneer that makes you look deeper,” while Darlene Charneco’s intricate mixed media works “explore memory and human connection with fabricated communities and natural landscapes, a resolute voice for a more sustainable future,” said Ms. Horowitz.
Bill Morrison’s early work as an experimental filmmaker involved rare archival and often deteriorating footage. He’s known for his work with celebrated composers, and his latest short film, “Incident,” exploring footage of a 2018 police shooting in Chicago, has been nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary.
Marianne Weil is s sculptor working in bronze using the “very laborious and meticulous lost wax process,” which she learned during her training in Italy.
“Her pieces lovingly reflect a fine balance and tension, as if the bronze is captured mid-movement,” said Ms. Horowitz.
Mr. Wexler, trained as an architect, produces work that “explores daily routines as rituals to be both honored and questioned… His understanding of space informs a unique perspective, encouraging us to reimagine our own,” she added.
Ms. Horowitz is North Fork Contemporary’s Co-Director, and she also leads the group’s studio tours. She came up for the idea of the program after three artists joined one of the studio tours, and “so much great conversation ensued between them.”
“They’re super thoughtful people. I chose five artists that I know, who I believe have wonderful insights into the way they work and why they do what they do and what happens in this whole process of creating,” said Ms. Horowitz in a late February interview with The Beacon . “How does the first proverbial brush stroke happen? Where does it come from? Has their work taught them anything about love and fear? How do they know when it’s complete? I’m taking a humanist aspect, rather than talking about their actual work.”
Ms. Horowitz, a psychologist by training, said what she’s really interested in is “who you are and how you feel about the subject you’re portraying. How does your life impact your work?
“I want to know not just how the sauce is made, but what happens emotionally for them, where does it come from? Early emotional life? Current emotional life? Is it inward or outward or impacted by current events?” she said.
The artists all shared formative experiences that were encouraging of the pursuit of art. Ms. Weil recalled playing in her mother’s art studio as a child.
“My mother gave me a paintbrush instead of a rattle,” she said, while Ms. Charneco, whose father was a graphic artist, would pursue his own projects at home and she “would watch an empty canvas become his world. I was inspired to see everything with curiosity. He was fascinated by life.” Mr. Wexler’s father worked seven days a week as a photographer, but on his rare days off his parents took him to museums in New York City, where he first got the idea that he could become an artist.
The artists, all of whom are well-established, have gotten to a place where they can trust the process, take risks, and also understand their work on a deeper level than they could when they were younger.
“The beauty of making art for many years is you have the opportunity to digest experiences from decades,” said Ms. Weil, who informally studied archeology earlier in her career, but feels she has now internalized that pursuit and found its place in her work. “Only with time do you understand what came before. You can make sense of the previous work by what you’re doing today. The beginnings are always filled with doubt. You have to live through that.”
Mr. Wexler said that he chose to study architecture because it seemed like a more stable career path than being an artist, but while in school he decided he “wanted to become the Andy Warhol of architecture, looking at the metaphysical, spiritual side of architecture. What happens when two people sit at a table across from each other? The table is a connection, a bridge, but it’s also a separation.”
He became active in the movement against the Vietnam War, and got involved with provocateurs with ideas about ‘anti-architecture,’ including making “a two-by-four out of tracing paper that can’t support itself, but supports the spiritual and metaphysical side of structure.”
He was inspired, he said, by the Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of tools catalogued in the 1960s, “because spaceship Earth didn’t come with an instruction manual. That became the internet… an early version of access to resources on spaceship Earth.”
Ms. Charneco said she made very linear pieces early on in her career, in a written code involving nails hammered into her tactile works. But “now the pieces tell me a story. Each time I sit down, I say it’s ok. I’m not supposed to know what this is about. Hammer the first nail again today, as this person, in this world, the way it is right now.”
“The works are model-like. I see them as immersive spaces, with scripts and databases,” she said. “I need to collaborate, and find that person I’m supposed to collaborate with. Time will show who that is.”
Mr. Morrison said his early work was more experimental, looking at the process of “nitrate film decaying, and an image interacting with that decay,” but his later work, including “Incident,” is more topical, but “they both interrogate the archive.”
The police shooting in “Incident” took place a couple miles from where Mr. Morrison grew up, and he partnered with a journalist and family friend there who had been reporting on police oversight in Chicago, and had been instrumental in a change in police policy to ensure police footage is available to the public within 14 days of an incident.
But now, he said the police can use the footage to “performatively create the narrative that is going to be their alibi.”
“It’s about the self-reflexivity of being on camera,” he added. “I had knowledge of an archive out there, holding these images, but despite all the cameras, the police were able to rubber stamp this, when they’d actually murdered a man in cold blood for no reason. We let people look at all the images, and let the viewer make their own conclusion.”
Ms. Pundyk said her work starts in a non-verbal place, where “abstraction is a direct emotional language for me, using color and form that I correlate with emotions.” She goes into the studio expecting uncertainty, but trusting that this is where the work comes from.
“Doubt for me is an acquired taste,” she said. “it’s where the beginning of interesting things happens for me. I run toward the self-doubt.”
“It’s a study of my experience with multi-generational trauma and the role that secrecy plays, where it operates like the David Lynch quote. It gets at this idea that there’s a ghost in the machine.”
“I feel like there are ghost images in your film shots,” she said to Mr. Morrision. “They’re tuning you in to what it is that you need to hear. I think a lot about the pre-verbal realm, and I see it in all of our work.”
As to advice for people beginning a career in art, Mr. Wexler urged them to buy real estate, so they would always have a roof over their heads.
Ms. Weil, who often works on a series of sculptures at once in her Orient studio, urged them to keep their lives simple.
Don’t “have embellished ideas of grandiosity and desires, because it just makes it complicated- you get distracted,” she said. “I’m easily distracted. I don’t like to cross the causeway, because I will be doing something other than what want to do. To be centered is to have a more simple life.”
Ms. Charneco urged them to stay curious, and Ms. Pundyk reminded them that they may have to destroy a part of a work that they love for the sake of the piece as a whole.
Mr. Morrison urged them to “create a body of work that’s true to you, so there’s nothing in there you’re ashamed of or did for the wrong reason. Over the years, that will have its own weight as a statement. It’s hard to see that arc when you’re a young artist, but over time it will have a wholistic meaning.”
Ms. Horowitz is calling this event a North Fork salon, and she’s hoping there will be many more such events in the future.
Find out more about North Fork Contemporary, and upcoming salons, artist studio tours and events, at northforkcontemporary.org.
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