Three creatives take inspiration from varied sources

By Manor Ink Staff

Closing out its 2025 exhibit season, Catskill Art Space on Main Street in Livingston Manor has mounted a show of work by three talented artists that finds inspiration in a variety of disparate concepts. They include military regalia, molecular biology and mother-daughter relationships.

In that last category are the creations of Kat Chamberlin. An artist who works in various media, her pieces in the CAS show were primarily sculptural, but also included a video panning over a domestic scene inhabited by the recumbent figure of her teenage daughter. Created during the COVID pandemic, the short film signifies parent/child power dynamics. “To pass the time, we’d play this game – I’d drag her around by the feet, like I was mopping the house,” said Chamberlin. The video shows her doing precisely that. “Feminine power can often be more powerful than patriarchy, at least as far as children are concerned.”

Dominating the main gallery space is Chamberlin’s large glass piece, a fragile circle of neon sign tubing suspended from the ceiling with wires and steel supports. The floor is covered with yellow carpeting that captures the piece’s shadow, making the words interspersed around its circumference clear: “Don’t break it. Peel it like a snake.” A quote from the novel The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, the words capture Chamberlin’s observation that children emerge from their mothers’ control only gradually, peeling away parental authority.

Mia Brownell’s art takes a more conventional approach, but draws inspiration from an unusual, non-art related source. Her still life paintings of fruit, flowers and vegetables may resemble the finely detailed art of the Dutch masters, but they are based on the circular structure of protein molecules as commonly depicted in scientific illustrations.

“It’s a cliche – ‘You are what you eat.’ But the paintings represent both the visible and invisible aspects of food,” Brownell said. “Molecules move in spirals, as do the elements in the paintings. So the images are a synthesis of the abstract with concrete representation.”

Gallery 1 features a display of clay and fabric works by Lexa Walsh. Titled “Breathe with Me Grieve with Me Heave with Me,” the pieces were begun in February 2022 when the world was watching both the Winter Olympics in Beijing and the start of the war in Ukraine. “Life and death were happening simultaneously,” Walsh said. “The pieces, especially the wall of dark clay ‘clouds,’ were very intuitive, capturing the feeling of the times.”

Other pieces include a pair of cheerleading pompoms looking “depleted” and a wall of military-style regalia recreated in clay, including a “mourning braid” that says “let’s embrace grief.”

The exhibit continues through Dec. 28; Catskill Art Space is at 48 Main Street in Livingston Manor. For more information, visitcatskillartspace.org/exhibitions.