A Blue Door in Mud Season
April 13- May 17, 2023
Opening reception: April 13th

A Blue Door in Mud Season works by Krista Dragomer, Cecil Howell, and Erin Treacy When you step through a blue door in mud season, you’ll find yourself in a strange, yet strangely familiar place. Landscapes tangle around you and fall away, revealing and rearranging depth and distance. Forms emerge through a symbiosis of color, shape, shared resources and shared threat. Bodies fruit, spore, and decay, moving in circles and cycles. Timelines collapse like stars, past, present, and future touch, becoming new, becoming other, becoming ghost. The ghosts of earthly time are each a new door, a new way to imagine what might live in the atmosphere we create in the present.
- Krista Dragomer

Erin Treacy: Reciprocal Relationships focuses on her Compost Project, 2019-2020, where she explored personal food remnants and debris that she stored in her freezer in Brooklyn, NY. Whether it is through a life drawing session, or many photographs taken while the food defrosts, Treacy is depicting an evolving scene where pieces fall, compositions shift, and colors change. It is a glimpse at the changes that will occur through the actual composting process, as our ‘garbage’ becomes fertilizer, facilitating reciprocal nourishment, yet another way how our environment can mirror our internal worlds and interpersonal relationships. Included in the exhibition are paintings of growth in the landscape as well - compositions of flora striving for new life and establishing roots in unexpected places. Treacy is interested in the environment's depiction of time through layers of growth and decay, and how this can serve as a visual metaphor for our own internal worlds. She plays with and questions the potential for reconciliation in the collision of beauty and disgust, searching for an uneasy balance both formally and conceptually.



 

Commissioned by The Long Island Arts Council 
On view at the Freeport Recreation Center
through 2020

This project was generously funded by the PT Faculty Professional Development Grant, administered by the Office of Research at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).


I collect rocks and water from every place I have ever been to remember the experience. I grew up in Suffolk county and have been investing the in-between space of representation and abstraction in nature and in ourselves. Growing up on Long Island, I loved/needed to escape the repetitive subdivisions and strip malls for variation in the landscape. Whether it was seeking out the micro-environments on the shores or savoring road trips with my family, this became the foundation of all my art-making.  By connecting visuals in our landscape to human experience, I play with the overlaps in our understanding of time, patterns, divergence, and associative reflection. 
 
This installation is created from pieces of dismantled ‘successful’ paintings, recycled ‘failed’ paintings, and trimmings of still existing paintings. Such assemblages are fantasies come to life: tokens of the natural world, deconstructed, reformatted, and presented in an entirely new and intuitive perspective. I strive to evoke the vibrancy and wonder of being in and of the world simultaneously.
 
I transform the flattened 2-dimensional contours of my drawings and paintings into figural objects that are equally familiar and disorienting. The work features fantastical, amorphous figures that take inspiration from the natural world.My fluid linework and vibrant color palette evoke flowers, fallen tree boughs, insects, and underwater crustacean. The assemblages blur the figurative boundary between the imaginative and the organic world.