Mildred's Lane and The Mildred Complex(ity)
in collaboration with

featuring

Shari Mendelson
Miranda Fengyuan Zhang

August 8 through September 12, 2021
Opening Event / Sunday, August 8, 12–4pm
37B Main Street. Narrowsburg, NY
River Valley Arts Collective is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of work by Shari Mendelson and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang in collaboration with Mildred’s Lane in Narrowsburg, NY.

Both Mendelson and Zhang work with discarded materials, reclaiming the excesses of commercial production through deliberate studio processes. They begin with an act akin to foraging, exploring local and social spaces for material waste. Found materials are transformed in the studio using a combination of assembly and aggregation. Through their work, both artists probe what the detritus of a particular moment in history may reveal about its culture, people and history.

Shari Mendelson, Double Deer with Cup, 2019, Repurposed plastic, hot glue, resin, acrylic polymer, mica, 20 x 7 ½ x 17 ½ inches. Photo credit: Alan Wiener.

Mendelson works primarily with plastic containers found along upstate roadsides and the sidewalks in Brooklyn–reworking everyday consumer waste into sculptures that evoke Classical Greek and Roman vases, Islamic glass, and terra-cotta artifacts. Mendelson cuts, collages, and paints her source material, transforming plastic surfaces into a luster that appears to be ceramic or glass, obscuring entirely its quotidian origins. Mendelson’s practice offers a new mythology for our contemporary civilization in distress–through which small acts of attentiveness and imagination can eclipse overconsumption and environmental neglect.

Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, Blue dusk, 2019, Wool on wood, 29 x 30 inches. Photo: Kunning Huang. Courtesy of the Artist and Chambers Fine Art.

Miranda Fengyuan Zhang’s knitted works comment on the scarcity and the surplus of her chosen material, yarn, at disparate historical moments. Presently, Zhang splits her time between Shanghai and New York–two hubs of the fashion industry, a sector which generates an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste annually. Zhang procures yarns from friends who work in fashion production, knitting dissimilar fibers info into formal, gestural compositions that are then stretched like paintings. Her fascination with industrial excess emerges from a story from her family history that is in stark contrast. In the early 1970’s, a period of extreme economic hardship in China, Zhang’s grandmother taught herself to knit clothing for her young children. Yarn was extremely scarce, so as the children grew older, she would unravel their clothing and combine the reclaimed yarn with scavenged material to create new articles for them to wear.

Both artists approach their materials through a broad lens of history, exploring how the substance of everyday life affects our individual selves, our community, and the planet. These ambitions resonate with the contemporary archeology projects at Mildred’s Lane, in which buried debris found at the Beach Lake, PA site is sorted, catalogued, and at times, incorporated into installations. Each of these artistic endeavors provoke reflection on day-to-day material choices and the long-lived effects of momentary consumption.

This exhibition has been curated by Candice Madey, chief curator and director of River Valley Arts Collective. River Valley Arts Collective was founded by Alyson Baker in January of 2019 and is currently presenting itinerant programming in the Hudson Valley while working to secure and equip a permanent location. As goals are fully realized in the coming years, it will provide artists with the resources to create and present their work and host programs that connect and foster the creative community of our region. Central to River Valley Arts Collective will be an exhibition venue alongside three expansive communal studio spaces outfitted with tools and equipment for work in fiber, wood and clay, available to artists of the Hudson Valley and artists who are participating in area residencies.

River Valley Arts Collective is grateful for generous support from: Mara Held, Daniel Belasco / The Al Held Foundation, ASD Fund of the Essex County Community Foundation, Athena Foundation, Cabbage Hill Farm Foundation, Mark Dion, Kristen Dodge, Emily Delafield Floyd Endowment Fund of Vassar College, John B. Koegel, Esq., J. Morgan Puett / Mildred’s Lane, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The O’Grady Foundation, Robin Panovka, Clay Rockefeller, Rydingsvard Greengard Foundation, Richard Salomon Family Foundation, Hart Perry / Southwood Wood Products, Helen Toomer / Stoneleaf Retreat, and SJ Weiler Fund.

PLAN YOUR VISIT:
This exhibition is on view at the The Mildred Complex(ity), a storefront project space located at 37B Main Street. Narrowsburg, NY 12764. The exhibition will be open Thursdays to Saturdays from 12 to 5pm, and Sunday 12 to 4pm throughout the run of the exhibition.

Please contact info@RVACollective.org or visit www.rvacollective.org for more information.