Through completed and preliminary drawings, paintings, and mixed media works Catherine Bickford, Narelle Sissons, and Sarah Valeri will share their first thoughts and beginning works as they begin their year’s work of curation and solo exhibitions for the 2024-2025 year.

Sarah Valeri explores sound and vibrational or temporal communication through the contact, pressure, and movement of drawing. The aspect of translating experiences of other bodies or elements through a faulty human hand, with all of its sensitivity and lack, has become central to her work. This process has evolved into creation of instruments, developing compositions through both recording and active drawing.

Catherine Bickford builds worlds in paint that are based on direct observation, memory, and dreams. Her paintings often present a journey for the viewer that takes them from the concrete “here and now” through a window, door, or portal into distant places that lie just beyond the limits of the frame.  In this exhibit she has on display small plein air works and studies that contain color and compositional explorations that will inform her future oil paintings. “I have instinctually begun a new chapter that places mark-making at the forefront of my practice”, said Catherine. “Last year I devoted my energy to exploring the extremes of color. Now my interest has shifted to the power of simple marks and how they define experience”

This show will be exhibited during Dumbo’s First Thursday Gallery Walk on October 3rd from 6-8pm and will remain on view until Saturday October 5th. Dumbo is a thriving arts community in Brooklyn. DUMBO- a designation that stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass – is an area of warehouses and cobblestone streets that has been transformed in recent years into a vibrant community of studios, design and craft workshops and galleries.