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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Please join RoCA 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. Free to the Public.

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