Less than GAGA for Garnerville's Art Festival

This weekend I attended Garnerville's 4th Annual GAGA Arts Festival. The festival consists of a large complex of beautiful former-industrial brick buildings that now house artists' studios. The artists open their studios, display their work, and invite the visitors to ask questions (and perhaps make purchases) over crackers.

Although the idea of seeing what local artists are working on is appealing, the majority of the art there was either a step above Thomas Kinkade or made by children and high school students. The "Soho of Rockland" houses art that is primarily painting, primarily landscape or nature-related, and commercially viable but not all that interesting. If you came looking for something more crafts-based or with a local tie, you instead found faux-New York that has obviously been disconnected from the gallery scene since...forever.

Despite the art scene there being dominated by the mediocre, it was still an interesting experience (at least for me but not my companions). Although I may not have been interested in their work, it was fascinating to see what people were doing outside of the Chelsea system. It was comforting to see that these artists sustained themselves by their work that they seemed to be doing on their own terms. There is a lot of freedom in the way that many of the artists at GAGA work and although they use it to create art that privileges the aesthetic and the technical, one can also imagine ways in which this mode of living and working could open the door to other freedoms.

Regardless, I did manage to find an artist whose work I really enjoy, Pat Hickman. A former professor and head of Fiber Arts program at University of Hawaii, Hickman's work is reminiscent of Kiki Smith's in material and occasionally style, but very distinct in tone and themes. Hickman's most striking work is created from organic materials, most commonly pig's intestines. Although the material she uses is one that would evoke disgust from most viewers, she transforms the material into a beautiful, thin golden skin-like material, such as in the piece to the right titled "One Size Fits All." The piece takes insides and turns them into outsides--clothes. But only superficially, as the piece itself admits by mimicking a paperdoll dress.

Another piece, "The Beginning of the Beginning," pictured on the left, uses notes and thread to create a tapestry of what looks like, upon close inspection, a series of small paper notes and to do lists. The threads cross off the items on the notes; the tasks are completed and subsumed into the larger work.

The works subtly evoke the feminine and the abject through clothes and association with craft and hobby. Unlike Kiki Smith's work, which uses the grotesque to comment on morbidity and illness, Hickman's work does not have such dark connotations. Rather, the work is a bit more ambiguous, mixing and confusing beauty and repulsiveness, mess and order.

To view more of Hickman's work, you'll unfortunately have to do your own research. There's limited information about her on the internet and no central gallery or artist's page, although you can find a few scattered pieces. You could also visit Garnerville, NY.