A Sense of Place

Poogy Bjerklie, Daisy Craddock, Daniel Loxton

Art Sales & Research barn exhibition space in Clinton Corners, NY

November 20, 2021 – January 1, 2022

Opening Reception with bonfire: November 20, 4pm-7pm

*a sense of place refers to the emotive bonds and attachments people develop or experience in particular localities or regions or when people feel a longing of belonging towards a place they are familiar with.

For this three-person exhibition at The Barn at Art Sales & Research in Clinton Corners, NY, work by artists Daisy Craddock, Poogy Bjerklie and Daniel Loxton will be on view. Each artist incorporates a personal relationship to space in their respective practices through representation, abstraction, and internally. Using a variety of mediums, Bjerklie, Craddock, and Loxton share a mutuality of mark making and a loose, yet, highly sensitive approach to their chosen surfaces.

Daisy Craddock, known historically for her deeply evocative monochrome diptychs, presents a series of intimate oil paintings and works on paper reflecting the landscape and skyline of nearby Germantown. Her landscapes are composed of color and strokes that allow for a rural familiarity, essential in nature. Looking closely, details are evident but also lost in the seeming density of the surface. Included in the show, “Heirloom Tomato” is a recent example of her monochromes. Seen together with her landscapes, the connections she makes behind the scenes are readily apparent, as are her relationships to the elements that make up color, light, and emotion.

Using a similar aesthetic execution, Poogy Bjerklie, builds up surfaces and then sands them down, resulting in tactile, yet ephemeral images. While still evident as landscape, the forms are elusive, like memories slipping away. Her paintings are, in fact, inspired from remembrances of time spent growing up in Maine.

With the mixed media works of Daniel Loxton, the youngest of the three, his relationship to the material’s history is where the work begins. Using found paper or objects as a starting point for his compositions, his often abstract and at times, representational spaces are built through combining and layering textures and mediums by weight, brush marks and transparencies. In one of his more direct landscapes, “Untitled (car drawing)” from 2020, his simple line-work captures a car, enlarged wheels, still, but perhaps alluding to speeding through town. The rest of his work in the exhibition leaves more to the imagination, his painterly gestures are abstract enough to be less identifiable in the realm of place, but suggestive where one might imagine ocean waves, a grassy knoll, or a bird emerging from a suitcase.

The work in A Sense of Place is as recognizable as it is strange and nostalgic, personal or communal. It is something we can enter, even if only through proposed memories. This exhibition seeks to unite us in a way that is warm and comforting. Over the last year and a half, we have sought individual spaces for repose when the communal wasn’t an option. Now as the world has reopened and gathering is once again a careful option, we welcome you to our place, our barn, a space for relationships, community and art.

99 Willow Lane, Clinton Corners, NY 12514, Artsalesandresearch.com, 1.347.768.3954