Teaching Gallery opens semester with two-person exhibition
TROY, N.Y. » The Teaching Gallery at Hudson Valley Community College announces The Production of Place, a two-person exhibition featuring landscapes by Leah Beeferman and Jen Hitchings that was organized by Thomas Lail, a professor in the college’s Fine Arts Department.
Following an opening reception with the artists from 4 to 6 p.m. Feb. 6, the exhibit continues through March 7 in The Teaching Gallery, located in the Administration Building on the Troy campus.
Lail will moderate a conversation with the artists from 3 to 4 p.m. on Feb. 6 in the Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium. All events, including the opening reception, are free and open to the public.
Like countless artists before them, Leah Beeferman and Jen Hitchings depict landscapes in their work.
“By engaging with practices that reach back to historical modes of seeing, representing and cataloging the ‘natural’ that surrounds us, Beeferman and Hitchings create places that reference actual locations, but simultaneously produce new geographies that raise questions about the social uses, histories, perils, and possibilities of today’s world,” Lail writes about the exhibition, and quotes a 2008 essay by artist and geographer Trevor Paglen: “geographers don’t just study geography… they make geographies [recognizing] that cultural production and the production of space cannot be separated from each other.”
Both Beeferman and Hitchings present pieces of places and spaces, linking these to the larger politics of history, memory, ecology, and science, according to Lail.
“Their work offers fragments and vistas of distant or remembered locations – what Beeferman calls ‘data,’ collected and reorganized.” Infused with personal references to landscapes both re
called and imagined, these images “conjure the triumphal and cataclysmic, and become scaffolding for a new geographical place – one that is both the original locale and a newly ‘produced’ place fertile with questions and possibility.”
Leah Beeferman is a New York City-based artist, using digital image-making, photography, text, sound, and video to explore relationships between observation and abstraction, natural and digital, physical and experiential. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant to Finland in 2016, she has exhibited her work and/or participated in artist residencies throughout the United States, in Canada, Finland, and Ireland.
A Brooklyn-based artist and curator, Jen Hitchings received a Queens Council on the Arts’ New Works
Grant in 2018. She’s had solo exhibitions at MEN Gallery in New York City, PROTO in Hoboken, NJ, and One River School in Englewood, NJ, and also has completed residencies in New York, Vermont, and Japan. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting & Drawing from SUNY Purchase College and a Certificate in Small Business & Entrepreneurship from CUNY Hunter.
Exhibitions in The Teaching Gallery are installed and assisted by students enrolled in Gallery Management courses and supported by the Department of Fine Arts, Theatre Arts and Digital Media, the Cultural Affairs Program and the Hudson Valley Community College Foundation. Associate Professor Tara Fracalossi is gallery director. Gallery hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; 1 to 7 p.m. Wednesday; noon to 4 p.m. Saturday; closed Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday, Feb. 26.