Upstate Gnarly

James Casebere (b. 1953, East Lansing, Michigan) is a pioneering photographer known for his meticulously constructed architectural models, which he photographs to create evocative, psychologically charged images. Educated at Michigan State University, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (BFA, 1976), the Whitney Independent Study Program, and California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 1979), Casebere has spent more than four decades exploring themes of architecture, power, memory, and social systems through staged environments.

Drawing from architectural, historical, and cinematic sources, his work examines the cultural myths embedded within domestic, institutional, religious, and civic spaces. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and were included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. In 2013, he was commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to create a cover image.

Casebere is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the American Academy in Rome's Abigail Cohen Rome Prize Fellowship. His work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Victoria and Albert Museum. Recent survey exhibitions have been presented in Munich, Brussels, Switzerland, and New York.

Artist’s website

Hollis Frampton (1936–1984) was an influential filmmaker, theorist, photographer, and early pioneer of digital art whose work helped redefine the possibilities of experimental cinema. Widely recognized as a leading figure of structural film, Frampton explored the relationships between image, language, perception, mathematics, and time through an ambitious body of films, photographs, writings, and media experiments. His landmark works, including Zorns Lemma (1970) and the ambitious unfinished cycle Magellan, combined language, mathematics, philosophy, and visual perception in groundbreaking ways.

In addition to his artistic practice, Frampton was a significant educator and thinker, helping to establish the Center for Media Study at the University at Buffalo as one of the most important programs for experimental film and media arts. His later work anticipated many developments in digital and interdisciplinary art.

Frampton's work has been the subject of major retrospectives and exhibitions internationally, including presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, Walker Art Center, and museums throughout Europe. His films remain foundational to contemporary moving-image practice and continue to influence artists, filmmakers, and scholars worldwide.

Ashley Garrett is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the energetic interplay between landscape, perception, and inner experience. Her paintings, often made through intuitive, full-body movement, create charged spatial atmospheres where form emerges and dissolves—evoking states of consciousness rather than specific places. Rooted in a daily engagement with the natural world around her upstate New York studio, her work is shaped by sensation, memory, myth, and the rhythms of light and weather.

Garrett has exhibited widely across the United States and internationally. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Psyche at SEPTEMBER Gallery in Kinderhook, NY (2025). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Katonah Museum of Art, the Torrance Art Museum, the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, and Art Omi, and in international venues in Seoul, Hiroshima, and Copenhagen. In 2023, she exhibited at UNTITLED Art Fair in Miami Beach with SEPTEMBER Gallery.

Her paintings are held in public and private collections and have been written about in The New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, Chronogram, and Dovetail Magazine, among others. She is the recipient of the Martha Boschen Porter Grant and holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Garrett is represented by SEPTEMBER Gallery and lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

Portrait photo credit: Rick Wenner

Artist’s website

Tanya Marcuse (born 1964, United States) is an artist whose photographs and videos explore the natural world through elaborate constructions that probe cycles of growth, decay, and transformation. Her work is included in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and many others. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of numerous awards and residencies, she has exhibited internationally at venues such as the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York; Galerie Miranda, Paris; Julie Saul Gallery, New York; and the Denver Art Museum in Colorado. Marcuse has published her work in several books, including Undergarments and Armor (2005), Wax Bodies (2012), Fruitless/Fallen/Woven (2019), and Deer (Roman Nvmerals, 2026). She teaches in the Photography Program at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Artist’s website

Portia Munson creates maximal installations, sculptures, paintings, and digital prints, synthesizing environmental and cultural themes from a feminist perspective. Her work has been the subject of over twenty solo exhibitions including at P·P·O·W, NYC; The Museum of Sex, NYC; Art Omi, Ghent, NY; White Columns, NYC; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR; Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA; Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY, Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Disjecta, Portland, OR; and NYU Langone Medical Center Gallery, NYC;among others. Munson’s work has also been included in numerous international group exhibitions including, Angelic Rebels, Company Gallery, NYC; Plasticulture, SVA Chelsea Gallery, NYC;Rituals of Devotion, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Still, Life! Mourning, Meaning, Mending, 21c Bentonville, Bentonville, AK, and 21c Louisville, Louisville, KY; Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and our Contemporary Moment, Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY; Dime-Store Alchemy, FLAG Art Foundation, NYC; Beyond Boundaries: Feminine Forms, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; PhotograpHER: Women Photographers from the Permanent Collection, Newman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Bad Girl, wallspaceplease, Dubai, UAE; 2019 Invitational Exhibition, American Academy of Arts and Letters, NYC; Cheeky: Summer Butts, Marinaro, NYC;and Bad Girls, curated by Marcia Tucker, New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, among others. Her public works include Pink Projects with the Art Production Fund, Rockefeller Center, NYC; Art in the Terminal, the Albany International Airport, Albany, NY; MTA Arts for Transit, Bryant Park MTA Station, NYC; a permanent Metropolitan Transit Authority installation in Brooklyn, NY; and OVERRIDE, EXPO Chicago, IL. 

Portia Munson (b.1961) lives and works in Catskill, NY. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union (1983), an MFA from Rutgers University (1990), and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1987). She has been awarded residencies at institutions including Woodman Residency Foundation, Tuscany, Italy; Cill Rialaig, Co. Kerry, Ireland; Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Italy; MacDowell Colony for the Arts, Peterborough, NH; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; and Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. Munson was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2019.

Artist’s page on PPOW Gallery Website

Zorawar Sidhu (b. 1985, Ludhiana, India) and Rob Swainston (b. 1970, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania)

Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston are a collaborative art duo exploring the intersection of historical print processes with contemporary technologies. Their projects investigate the complexities of contemporary social issues by drawing from the history of print as the medium par excellence of social movements. They have exhibited together at the Hall Art Foundation, Reading (2024); University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery, Buffalo (2024); Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin (2024); Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, Portland (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Arlington (2023); The Patricia and Philip Frost Art Museum, Miami (2023); Syracuse University Art Museum, Syracuse (2023); United States Department of State, Washington, D.C. (2023); Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton (2023); among others.

Sidhu and Swainston’s collaborative work is included in the collections of the Art Museum of West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia ; Hall Collection, Reading, Vermont; Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, Portland, Oregon; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; New York Public Library, New York, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany; and the Syracuse University Art Museum, Syracuse, New York.

Zorawar Sidhu has a background in art history and fine arts. His projects recreate art historical artifacts using contemporary technology and historical materials and techniques. He has exhibited projects with galleries and museums nationally, including exhibitions with Marginal Utility, Philadelphia; Spring/Break Art Show with Field Projects, New York; Five Myles, Brooklyn; the Museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and the Museum of The Town of Vestal, New York.

Rob Swainston’s work is informed by a dual academic background in political science and art. He is an Associate Professor at Purchase College and co-founder and Master Printer for Prints of Darkness. Rob has been awarded numerous residencies including Skowhegan, Marie Walsh Sharpe, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Solo and group exhibitions include Marginal Utility, Philadelphia; David Krut Projects, New York; BravinLee Programs, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown; Print Center New York, New York; Canada Gallery, New York; Queens Museum, New York; and the Bronx Museum, New York. In 2020–21, Rob was the Ludwig Foundation Professor for Printmaking at the Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.

Artist’s page on Petzel Gallery Website

Sarah Slappey (b. 1984, Columbia, South Carolina) is a painter based in Brooklyn, NY. Slappey received her MFA from Hunter College in 2016. She has had solo exhibitions at Maria Bernheim Gallery (Zurich, Switzerland) and Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Pace Gallery (Hong Kong, China); the Pond Society (Shanghai, China); the Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH); ICA Miami (Miami, FL); Perrotin (Paris, France); Schlossmuseum (Linz, Austria); Marinaro (New York, NY); Musée D’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Geneva, Switzerland); Venus Over Manhattan (New York, NY); Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art (Suzhou, China); White Cube (Paris, France); Tick Tack (Antwerp, Belgium); The Pit (Los Angeles, CA); and Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York, NY). 

Slappey’s work is included in the permanent collections of Hirshhorn Museum (Washington D.C), The Albertina Museum (Vienna, Austria), Pérez Art Museum (Miami, FL), Institute Contemporary Art (Miami, FL), Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH), Musée D’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Geneva, Switzerland), Orange County Museum of Art (Costa Mesa, CA), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), The Pond Society (Shanghai, China), The Vanhaerents Art Collection (Brussels, Belgium), The Zabludowicz Collection (London, England), and the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art (Suzhou, China). Slappey’s work has been reviewed by Artforum, The New Yorker, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Artsy, ArtSpace, Harper’s Bazaar Japan, Vogue Italia, and Flash Art, among others. She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.

Artist’s website

Michael Snow (1928–2023) was one of Canada's most celebrated and influential contemporary artists, whose multidisciplinary practice encompassed film, photography, sculpture, sound, drawing, writing, and music. Best known for his landmark film Wavelength (1967), Snow helped define the structural film movement and profoundly expanded the possibilities of experimental cinema.

Over a career spanning more than six decades, Snow explored perception, time, language, and consciousness through a body of work that moved fluidly across artistic disciplines. He received numerous honors, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, the Order of Canada, and France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work was the subject of major retrospectives and solo exhibitions at institutions including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Vienna Secession.

Snow's work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Canada, Centre Pompidou, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and many other leading museums worldwide. Renowned for his relentless experimentation and intellectual rigor, Snow remains a foundational figure in contemporary art, film, and media practice.

Artist’s page on Jack Shainman Website

Susan Wides is an American artist working in photography and moving image whose abstract works explore embodied perception in the natural world, transforming these encounters into reflections on presence, impermanence, energy, and care. Made on site as single exposures, her images use variations in focal depth to bring the visual representation of the environment closer to the profound experience of it.

Critic Carter Ratcliff writes, “By freezing complex perspectives, Wides invites us to come alive to vision as a kind of inventiveness... connecting us to our surroundings and, ultimately, to one another.”

Wides has exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad, including presentations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art. Her work is held in over twenty public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Brooklyn Museum; the Norton Museum of Art; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Haifa Museum of Art; the Hudson River Museum; the International Center of Photography; and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Wides's public art practice engages the architectural scale and communal function of civic spaces. She is Curator and Director of 'T' Space | Steven Myron Holl Foundation, where she develops exhibitions and public programs that bring together art, architecture, ecology, and community.

Portrait photo credit: Hillary Harvey

Artist’s website

Brian Wood’s paintings, often called visionary, are structures to hold wildly disparate feelings, thoughts, and images in dynamic equilibrium. It’s as if every thought that can be thought and every dream dreamt might appear in these relentless paintings. His images embrace both tender personal warmth and transpersonal chill. Using intense idiosyncratic color, the entire history of painting arises through Wood’s mark making – the many and various speeds and textures amplify as they converse. From fast gestural brushings to smears with fingers or sticks to extremely detailed rendering, Wood attends to every part of a painting’s surface until the full emotional and spiritual force demanded by the image is realized. Figuration and abstraction are not competing strategies here but are deeply integrated distinctions of consciousness, playful and generative. Objects and spaces interpenetrate and transmute, trading fixed identity for mystical union. In each painting, the deep past and distant future interleave in an eternal present, softening the hardened split between then and now and what’s to come. The paintings’ continuous and tensile space traces the depths of the “inner” world to the far reaches of the “outer” world – with no borderline.

Holland Cotter, in his New York Times review of a Brian Wood solo exhibition, wrote: “…[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.”

Brian Wood’s paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, films, and books are exhibited internationally. Wood is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art in DC, Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Museum of Modern Art in Prague, National Gallery of Canada, LA County Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Blanton Museum of Art, and many others.

Wood has had 50 solo exhibitions in international galleries and museums and has exhibited in more than 200 group shows including at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, LA County Museum of Art, Museum of American Art in DC, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Seibu Museum in Tokyo, Documenta in Germany, American Academy of Arts & Letters, NYC, and many others.

Wood's awards include the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the 2020 American Academy of Arts & Letters Purchase Award, and numerous Canada Council Grants. Brian Wood was a 2019 Rome Prize finalist.

Portrait photo credit: Rick Wenner

Artist’s website