A Sense of Place

November 20th 2021 - January 1st 2022

Poogy Bjerklie, Daisy Craddock, and Daniel Loxton

Opening Reception with bonfire: November 20, 4pm-7pm 

*a sense of place refers to the emotive bonds and attachments people develop or experience  in particular localities or regions 

or  

when people feel a longing of belonging towards a place they are familiar with. 

For this three-person exhibition at The Barn at Art Sales & Research in Clinton Corners, NY,  work by artists Daisy Craddock, Poogy Bjerklie and Daniel Loxton will be on view. Each artist incorporates a personal relationship to space in their respective practices through representation, abstraction, and internally. Using a variety of mediums, Bjerklie, Craddock, and  Loxton share a mutuality of mark-making and a loose, yet, highly sensitive approach to their chosen surfaces. 

Daisy Craddock, known historically for her deeply evocative monochrome diptychs, presents a  series of intimate oil paintings and works on paper reflecting the landscape and skyline of nearby Germantown. Her landscapes are composed of color and strokes that allow for a rural familiarity, essential in nature. Looking closely, details are evident but also lost in the seeming density of the surface. Included in the show, “Heirloom Tomato” is a recent example of her monochromes. Seen together with her landscapes, the connections she makes behind the scenes are readily apparent, as are her relationships to the elements that make up color, light,  and emotion. 

Using a similar aesthetic execution, Poogy Bjerklie, builds up surfaces and then sands them down, resulting in tactile, yet ephemeral images. While still evident as landscape, the forms are elusive, like memories slipping away. Her paintings are, in fact, inspired from remembrances of time spent growing up in Maine.  

With the mixed media works of Daniel Loxton, the youngest of the three, his relationship to the material’s history is where the work begins. Using found paper or objects as a starting point for his compositions, his often abstract and at times, representational spaces are built through combining and layering textures and mediums by weight, brush marks and transparencies. In one of his more direct landscapes, “Untitled (car drawing)” from 2020, his simple line-work captures a car, enlarged wheels, still, but perhaps alluding to speeding through town. The rest of his work in the exhibition leaves more to the imagination, his painterly gestures are abstract enough to be less identifiable in the realm of place, but suggestive where one might imagine ocean waves, a grassy knoll, or a bird emerging from a suitcase.  

The work in A Sense of Place is as recognizable as it is strange and nostalgic, personal or communal. It is something we can enter, even if only through proposed memories. This exhibition seeks to unite us in a way that is warm and comforting. Over the last year and a half,  we have sought individual spaces for repose when the communal wasn’t an option. Now as the world has reopened and gathering is once again a careful option, we welcome you to our place, our barn, a space for relationships, community and art. 

 Artist Bios: 

Poogy Bjerklie was born in Maine and attended Haystack School studying sculpture and jewelry. She later graduated from Maine Collage of Art in metal smithing. Following that she became a jewelry designer and diamond setter. She joined an artist group and expanded into furniture design, specializing in painted fabric. She used her fabric to make wearable art leading her into the fashion world. Relocating to NYC, she exhibited at the American craft museum and Lincoln Center. In 1999 she started making paintings in a family member’s camp in her native Maine and learned that she needed to be reconnected to her roots and that painting was the medium that best expressed her vision. Poogy’s first solo show in 2006 was followed by exhibitions in galleries, museums and universities, including Edward Thorp Gallery and Maine Museum of Art and Sears-Peyton gallery in NYC. 

Daisy Craddock (b.1949, Memphis,TN) received a BA in Fine Arts from Rhodes College and an  MFA in Painting from the University of Georgia. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States. Recent one person shows include Daisy Craddock Harvest at Front Room  Gallery, NYC, with Garvey Simon Gallery, October 29-November 22, 2020, and Daisy  Craddock: A View of One’s Own, August 2017 at John Davis Gallery in Hudson NY. An installation of Daisy’s work from the 1980’s was on view in the lobby of the Georgia Museum of  Art from July 23 – October, 2018. Recent group shows include Eight by Ten, Pamela Salisbury  Gallery, Hudson, NY, December 2020, Art on Paper 2019 at Weatherspoon Art Museum. 

Daniel Graham Loxton (born 1987 in Montclair,NJ) graduated with a BFA in Film & Video from the School of Visual Arts in 2009. He has shown widely in New York at JDJ, 57W57Arts,Wild  Embeddings and Rose Burlingham Projects, among others. In Spring 2021, Loxton had a solo show “Pillow for Durer” at Jir Sandel in Copenhagen, Denmark that includes a forthcoming  book of drawings with introduction by Los Angeles based curator Chris Sharp. Most recently  he made his UK debut with a solo show, “The Patron Saint of Turning”, at Claas Reiss  (Projektraum London) in London, UK. Loxton lives and works in Cold Spring, NY. 

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