River Woman

Nancy Cohen

Fritz Horstman

Ellen Kozak

Kathleen Vance

Flat File Featured Artists: Caetlynn Booth and Deborah Freedman

Elemental, universal, sustenance, beautiful, dangerous, the river and the woman merge and become one entity. Sharing a deep passion for this River Woman, our artists express their awe while raising awareness of the fragility and the amazing resilience of the rivers in our lives.

Nancy Cohen

Interested in the juxtaposition of fragility and strength – evident in our personal lives and the broader environment. Nancy Cohen is drawn to handmade paper for its transformative qualities, its potential for translucency, and its ability to be both skin and structure. Share these dualities and allows the artist to merge material and content.

Her working methods allow an implication of the body in the work—its touch and tenderness, its frailty and endurance. In her installations, elements hang in the balance, each one necessary, vulnerable, beautiful and above all interdependent.

Nancy Cohen’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and is represented in important collections, such as The Montclair Museum, The Newark Public Library, The Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Yale University Art Gallery and The Zimmerli Museum.

She has completed numerous large-scale, site-specific projects including for Thomas Paine Park in lower Manhattan, The Staten Island Botanical Garden at Snug Harbor, The Ross Woodward School in New Haven, CT, The Noyes Museum of Art in Oceanville, NJ, The Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, Park HaGalil in Karmiel, Israel, and for Howard University in Washington DC. Her most recent installation Hackensack Dreaming was traveled and exhibited at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, New Jersey City University, Jersey City, NJ, The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia, PA and The Power Plant Gallery at Duke University, Raleigh, NC.

Cohen’s work has been reviewed in books and periodicals, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, ArtNews, American Craft, Glass Quarterly and Sculpture Magazine. Awards include five fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts, two from the Brodsky Center, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, an ISE Cultural Foundation Grant and a workspace residency from Dieu Donné.

She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Millay Colony, The Archie Bray Foundation, The Pilchuck Glass School, WheatonArts, Bullseye Glass and The Studio at Corning.

She currently teaches at Queens College and Pratt Institute.

Ellen Kozak

Kozak’s visual ideas come from observing motion. A glimpse of fleeting color will spark a complete proposition for a painting. Since 1994 her studio is perched just above the bank of the Hudson so that she can looks out on the river in all seasons. In close physical contact with her surroundings, her careful scrutiny reveals subtle shifts in phenomena, both natural and man-made. Completely entranced by the visual properties of light, color, and material presence Kozak remains attentive to changing environmental conditions. She works with these components in an empirically responsive and experimental way. Water and oil paint share properties of viscosity; delving into paint as a mimetic medium she uses its physicality to perform in ways similar to her subject.

Ellen Kozak is a New York City-based painter, video artist and the creator of artists’ books in collaboration with writers Dore Ashton, Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey O’Brien. Her works have been exhibited in museums, nationally and internationally. At MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies she worked in video and as a CAVS fellow showed in Documenta VI, at the Koelnischer Kunstverein and the American Center for Artists and Students, Centre Pompidou.

Exhibitions and awards include the Sloan Foundation and the Cambridge Council of the Arts for her early video installations, consequently exhibited at the List Visual Art Center at MIT and the Addison Gallery of American Art, JVC, the Osaka Museum of Contemporary Art, the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art, and Gallery Amelia in Tokyo.

Kozak is the recipient of artist residencies at the Blue Mountain Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Prix Résidence Moulin a Nef in France as well as two residencies at Yaddo. Following her 1990 Yaddo residency, Kozak began painting in a studio in upstate New York. Her first solo exhibition was in 1992 at 55 Mercer Street Gallery. Other solo exhibitions in New York include Carolyn J. Roy Gallery, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, the President’s Gallery at Pratt Institute, Art Resources Transfer, Katerina Rich Perlow Gallery, and The Hudson River Museum of Art. Kozak has received grants from NYFA’s Fiscal Sponsorship Program, the George Sugarman Foundation and the Pratt Institute Faculty Development Grant Fund.

Reviews of her work have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art in America, Art & Antiques, Art New England, The Print Collector’s Newsletter and other publications. She has written on video for the journal Media Arts.

Working along the banks of rivers for over twenty years, has made her keenly aware of the fragility of the environment and of special new challenges. She participates in efforts to promote awareness through her involvement with the environmental organization Hudson Riverkeeper. These concerns are incorporated into her work.

Collections in which her work is included are The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Fogg Art Museum, The National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, The Hudson River Museum, The New York Public Library, Yale University Sterling Memorial Library, Museum of Modern Art Library among others.

Frtiz Horstman

While working on a large building project several years ago the artist, Fritz Horstman was struck by a poetry in the unfinished state of the construction site. He was drawn specifically to the space between the plywood walls that were raised as formworks for the pouring of cement. That space could only exist for a few hours before the cement truck arrived, but in that moment it was a revolving abstraction of potential, delineation, growth, and destruction. Once filled it was gone: the plywood was stripped away, the earth was backfilled. To suspend that moment he began building models of formworks. Leaving them unfilled, they are perpetually unfinished.

From models based directly on architecture, Horstman expanded to forms found in the landscape. Making a formwork that depicts constraint upon the landscape is not exactly a reversal of the formwork’s function, but it asks different questions than a formwork designed for a building would. Why would you make a cement creek? What is the relationship between a flowing creek and poured cement? Is this a barrier or just delineation?

For River Woman Odetta, in addition to several small sculptures in the Flat File, Horstman will install Formwork for the East River, which describes that river’s shape as it flows from Rikers Island to the tip of Manhattan. The 3 x 18 x 7 foot sculpture includes inlets for the Harlem River and Newtown Creek. One side is defined by the shape of the east side of Manhattan, the other by the western edges of Queens and Brooklyn. Roosevelt Island sits in the middle looking like a casket. Were this formwork poured with concrete, the resulting mass would be a wall, not a river.

Acknowledging change, while attempting to hold the moment, the delineated spaces remain conspicuously empty, begging to be filled. During previous installations of several large outdoor Formwork sculptures similar in scale and material to Formwork for the East River at least one person approached and asked when we would pour. Those people had mentally filled the space. These are spaces into which one can pour their thoughts.

Two videos will be included in River Woman. In Kannagawa Voices villagers in the small Japanese town of Onishi were asked to make the sounds of their local river with their voices. Ice Voices comes from the artist’s shipmates’ attempts to recreate with their voices the bizarre sounds of Arctic ice.

Fritz Horstman works with the landscape and the perception of the perception of natural phenomena. He has recently exhibited his sculptures and installations in Brooklyn, Massachusetts, California, Japan, France, and Norway, and currently is featured in the 2016/17 deCordova Biennial in Lincoln, MA. He has curated exhibitions in New Haven, New York and Svalbard. Recent residencies include Shiro Oni in Onishi, Japan, and The Arctic Circle Residency. He received his MFA from MICA in 2011 and his BA in studio art from Kenyon College in 2001. He is artist residency and education coordinator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, CT. Musically he is half of the duo Spacelover.

Kathleen Vance

Kathleen Vance explores environmental issues such as water conservation and protection through positive stewardship of the land. She looks to convey an appreciation of nature and transmits the experience of being outdoors through her aural and visual installations.

For the site-specific work, “Newtown Creek” Vance looked to historical maps and nautical charts to find the “prime” of the waterway. Once pastoral land around the creek, it is now surrounded by neighborhoods whose sewers drain into the creek and the original tidal flow has been impeded by urban design, creating a stagnant water body.

For her installation at Odetta the artist will recall the natural path of this waterway, and will show an alternate clarified course. Researching maps of the waterway from historical documents and charts, She has traced the tidal flow of Newtown Creek from its tributaries: Dutch Kills, Whale Creek, Maspeth Creek and English Kills and redirected the water’s course to a path out of time. Fusing components of its early history of green pastures along its banks and the distressed view of industrial waste, she looks to find the heart of the waterway and a possible solution for the future.

Kathleen Vance has received numerous grants and awards for her artwork including: a travel grant to research the geo-thermal regions of Iceland, a grant from the Puffin foundation for public sculpture and a grant from the Brooklyn Arts council which aided the development and implementation of an outdoor community based art project in East New York. Kathleen was selected to participate in ‘Emerge 7’, an artist development program organized by Aljira, Center for Contemporary Art, with the Creative Capital Foundation. Ms. Vance was artist in resident in Berlin, Germany, presenting a workshop on environmental arts in connection with the Grunewald Parks Department in Germany. Kathleen was a past board member of the Sculptor’s Guild, an active board member of ARTfront, Inc., and a member of the ART artist collective.

Her work was recently featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville and at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT. Kathleen will be featured at Volta New York in March. Sh has exhibited extensively in New York and internationally and continues to live and work in Brooklyn, New York.

Odetta’s Flat Files are curated and change with every exhibition. Caetlynn Booth will show a series of oil paintings on the back wall of the gallery and artists Fritz Horstman and Deborah Freedman will feature sculptures and oil on paper paintings in the files themselves.

Odetta is a Bushwick-based gallery created and run by artist Ellen Hackl Fagan. The gallery exhibits the works of contemporary artists focusing on Color Theory, Minimalism, Glyphs, Buddha Mind, Fluxus, History, Humor, Psychedelia, Ephemera, Science, Math and Music.

River Woman is the gallery’s 22nd exhibition.