Press Release:
Steven Harvey at Market Street Studio
Peter Acheson, Gideon Bok, Abigail Dudley, and Mary Flinn
July 21 – July 24, 2023

Steven Harvey/SHFAP presents in association with Upstate Art Weekend an installation of paintings by Peter Acheson, Gideon Bok, Abigail Dudley and Mary Flinn in Paul Villinski and Amy Park’s Market Street Studio in Ellenville. The artists in this exhibition are serious practitioners of painting, two of whom, Acheson and Flinn, live and work near Chatham, NY. These four artists create a conversation between abstraction and representation, they deal with the concrete building blocks of perception and environment – symbols and language, a landscape, the studio – but expand upon the observed to create new worlds. All four artists display an exquisite pictorial sense, whether depicting calligraphy, details of a garden, or an ongoing perceptual inquiry into the interior. They meet their diverse aesthetic interests in an emboldened quest with open arms.

Mary Flinn is a Baltimore-born graduate of the Swain School of Design and Queens College who works in oil, watercolors and pastels.Her Redonesque shapes and colors allude to sensory experience, memory, and the magic inherent in landscape, lending her work a dreaminess that is nonetheless rooted in the familiar. She has studied Japanese calligraphy as well as the Indian tradition of Mysore painting. Flinn’s work has been exhibited at Prince Street Gallery in NYC, as well as the Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Dartmouth College Hopkins Center, and most recently at the Gallerie Zurcher in 2022.

Gideon Bok lives and works in Maine. He received his BA from Hampshire College and his MFA from Yale University, and has taught at both Hampshire College and Boston University. Bok experiments with accelerated color and movement, so that layers of time and space are blended in the static image of the piece. He takes the process of painting from observation in the studio to an extreme, writing that “if the sitter or person moved, or moved something in the studio, or even if the light changed, the painting had to change in relation to it,” explaining that this act of watching “changes the … painting from a still object to a time-based medium.” Bok has shown several times at SHFAP, most recently in 2023, and also in 2010, 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2020. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, in 2005 he was included in The American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition where he received the Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Fund Purchase Award.

In another age Peter Acheson might have been an alchemist or lexicographer; he references a vernacular of images and symbols, re-inscribing them to create new meanings. This visual language oscillates between familiarity and obscurity, energetic motion and stillness, and abstraction and enigmatic symbols. The organic, rough quality of the paintings is balanced with a profound lyric voice created through painterly gestures and the occasional addition of text, often derived from poetry, music and art history whose forms are reminiscent of ancient symbols from diverse cultures. Acheson was born in Washington, DC where he grew up with Chris Martin. He received a BFA from Yale in 1976, and his work has been exhibited at The Novella Gallery and the John Davis Gallery in Hudson. SHFAP has shown his work multiple times, most recently in a solo show in 2022. Acheson lives and works in Ghent, New York.

Abigail Dudley received her BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2021, and continues to live and work in her birthplace of New Jersey. Like Flinn and Bok, Dudley begins with landscapes and familiar interiors as the premise for pictorial discovery, but utilizes a process of invention to reveal an element of the strange. Her compositions depict a mosaic of interlocking forms where objects and figures shift in and out of soft focus. Dudley blurs images, skews perspectives, and adds amorphous painterly gestures, resulting in work that weaves between abstraction and representation. The artist writes that her paintings “unfold stories of fleeting moments borne from quiet observation” that “show the value and beauty that is found in the moments in life that are often looked over.” While studying at PAFA, Dudley received the Raymond D. & Estelle Rubens Scholarship for European Travel. She is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshield Grant, once in 2020 and again in 2022, and was the artist in residence at the Lois and Charles X Carlson Landscape Residency in 2021. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions throughout the Northeast, including New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and twice at SHFAP, most recently in a solo show in 2022.