Upstate Gnarly

A show of 4 artists:

Gracelee Lawrence / Brian Wood
Courtney Puckett / Ashley Garrett

in Ashley Garrett & Brian Wood’s studio

Upstate Art Weekend
July 19-21, 2024

For Upstate Art Weekend, we present an exhibition in our studio of four artists, two painters paired with two sculptors: Brian Wood, Ashley Garrett, Gracelee Lawrence, and Courtney Puckett.

The conversation between the works span physical, gestural, philosophical, and emotional spaces.

All four artists’ works have a generative, unfolding quality as if arising from some underlying logic or deep structural order that lies just out of sight. 

An exhibition of indoor and outdoor large scale sculpture paired with large scale painting, in a large 4,000 square foot space, this exhibition draws inspiration from the surrounding natural landscape around Brian Wood & Ashley Garrett’s studio.

Directly abutting the studio space are old growth woods, gnarly branches, creeks, streams, elevations, and earth, responsive to the seasons and weather. 

Sculptures by Gracelee Lawrence explore intricacies of geometric and biomorphic rhythms / while Brian Wood’s paintings appear as everything you could ever think, feel, and dream, impossibly woven together.

Courtney Puckett’s sculptures are full of line, texture, and sensitive color: standing uncanny figures / Ashley Garrett’s lyrical paintings pulse with color and touch, emotions rippling energy through space.

Together, the show expresses scale, presence, environmental memory, and the shimmering rural landscape of the Hudson Valley. 

Gracelee Lawrence “…is going mostly for shine and bright, artificial colors, used singly or in multiples, thanks to variegated threads. The resulting pieces seem enveloped in shiny gift-wrap ribbon. They can be mouthwatering…This is a great show, to which my initial reaction was, for some reason, “Take that, Jeff Koons.”
-ROBERTA SMITH, THE NEW YORK TIMES

More about Gracelee

Brian Wood “…creates a kind of Symbolist world in which emerging into life and being devoured by it are part of the same inexorable process. As in the early work by Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove, the erotic and the spiritual are of a piece.”
-HOLLAND COTTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES

More about Brian

Ashley Garrett’s paintings "…through their swirling forms, capricious brushstrokes, and passages of brilliant light, capture the vibrant forces of nature. It is as if the forests in which Artemis hunted or the seas which wrecked Odysseus’s ship are given agency in Garrett’s work and begin to tell their own tales of turmoil and splendor.”
—ROBERT R. SHANE, THE BROOKLYN RAIL

More about Ashley

Courtney Puckett’s work “…occupies a space among countless artists in its use of craft materials like yarn, scrap fabric and tinsel. Puckett takes this a step further…her classical approach to the figure lending fresh significance to epics like Homer’s Odyssey, in which Penelope uses weaving to manipulate her patriarchal destiny.”
-KRISTEN FREDERICKSON, CURATOR

More about Courtney

Ashley Garrett & Brian Wood’s studio in East Chatham, NY, near conservation areas in Red Rock and Beebe Hill State Forest

We are located off I-90 where County Route 24 and County Route 5 meet.

Click below for directions: