Two Shows At Duck Creek

From September 10 to October 16, The Arts Center at Duck Creek presents “Jesse McCloskey: Night Gallery.” The show opens with a reception on Saturday, September 10, from 5 to 7 p.m.

During lockdown, McCloskey’s studio building in Brooklyn emptied out as many artists left the city. He spent this quiet, uninterrupted time assembling the series of works featured in “Night Gallery,” cutting and collaging shapes of paper and other mixed media together, looking for what de Kooning called the “Flickering Glimpse” of form.

“The push and pull of form that defines the kind of painting Hoffman spoke of, also applies to this work as the paintings wax and wane between representation and abstraction,” McCloskey explains. “It’s a battle for clarity and surprise through form that has forced a distillation my work down to a few themes: sex, death, and the artist’s studio.

While the subjects I choose to paint are a constant source of love, desire, and need, it’s the craving of something intangible, something I can’t see until it arrives in the paintings that I really want, so I work them until it does. This is how they become heavily layered, excavated, then papered over again and again until the representational and the abstraction come together.”

McCloskey (born 1964, Quincy, Massachusetts) is a New York based artist hailing originally from a tiny town in Massachusetts where little abandoned cemeteries list smallpox victims and stories of accused witches lay buried near the town green. He received a BFA from the Swain School of Design in Massachusetts and a MFA from Parsons School of Design in New York.

Also on view at Duck Creek from September 10 to October 16 is “Sally Richardson: Sculpture.” The show opens with a reception on Saturday, September 10, from 4 to 6 p.m.

The natural world is the driving force behind Richardson’s sculpture, which explores human and plant-like forms and their connection to nature. Using only hand tools (mallets, chisels and rasps), she carves both wood and stone. She approaches each piece of wood and block of stone with a reverence for its character and uniqueness. Throughout the subtractive carving process of each material — limestone, Carrara marble, local wood (mountain laurel, cherry and walnut) and totara (New Zealand native wood) — the artist imagines an inner life emerging from within.

Richardson grew up in a small coastal village in East Anglia, England, with a rich history of shipbuilding, fishing and maritime folklore. Both her father and grandfather worked aboard lighthouse ships in the North Sea shaping her strong connection to the sea and its traditions. For the past 18 years, she has lived and worked in Montauk, drawn to a familiar coastal history and a landscape that continues to inspire.

The Arts Center at Duck Creek is at 127 Squaw Road in East Hampton. For more information, visit duckcreekarts.org.