Notes From The City: An Abundant Life

On the last day of June I had a telephone conversation with Eileen Kaminsky, the Founder of Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation (ESKFF). At this time in a normal year Eileen would have been in New York and the Spring Residency at ESKFF would have been ending, we would have been celebrating the annual fundraiser, and the summer youth mentoring program, Sol Studio, would have been getting ready to begin. But because this hasn't been a normal year at all, none of those things were happening, and ESKFF and Mana Contemporary where it is located, had been closed to the public in March. The Winter Residency had been abruptly ended and there were no Artists making art in this usually vibrantly alive and creative space. During my conversation with Eileen, she mentioned that, though ESKFF would not be able to host the youth and Sol Studio at Mana, she would be allowed to have three adult Artists in the space. She and Gina Maffei, the Director of ESKFF, had reached out to some local Artists, but they hadn't been able to find anyone who was available. I said that I could find people for her, and thought of someone immediately, the 3-D Artist Dana Gambale who I have written about before and who I knew had been wanting to apply for the Residency. I had already introduced her to Eileen at the fundraiser last year and she had donated work for it and also helped with the photography at the event. Eileen said if she was available, the space was hers and if she could find two other friends they could all do the Residency together. I sent Dana a quick message, she agreed immediately and began to contact other Artists. In the meantime I thought of someone else I could ask, and within about an hour or so we had our three Residency Artists. It turned out that one Artist was unable to do the Residency due to a prior agreement with her gallery, but the other two Artists were able to start the following week. At the end of July I stopped by to visit them for a blog post, and heard the good news that their Residency had been extended for another month.

In an interesting turn of events, when I initially asked Dana who her friend was so that I could share her name with the Director of ESKFF so that she could be on the lookout for her online application and also begin the process of helping her get a badge to enter the building on a regular basis, when Dana said it was Alice Hepburn the name rang a bell. I had known an Alice Hepburn many years ago but I had not seen her in about fifteen years. The last time I saw her was at a Thanksgiving dinner at her mother's loft in Tribeca, and I was pretty sure that the age of that Alice Hepburn would match up with this one. I asked Dana if Alice was related to Pamela Hepburn, a Captain who is a well liked and respected member of the sailing and historic ship community in New York Harbor, and Dana said Pamela was Alice's mother. In a moment's time I was brought back to another part of my own life, when I lived in Soho and was a neighbor of another friend of Pamela's, the Artist Arden Scott and her husband Keith who owned a loft in Tribeca and whose daughter Kate belonged to the same theater company I had belonged to since I first moved to New York. And there was also a time when I was sailing quite a bit on historic ships in New York Harbor and attending many events in the sailing community, and all of those different worlds of my life were suddenly brought right into my present.

On the day when I first went to visit Dana and Alice at ESKFF we talked about their work and lives. They had some work in process but I decided to return the following week when they would have more to show me that I could photograph. Each time it was as if I was going to visit a whole group of people from my own past, because when I look at Alice I see her in my mind over the years when I knew her surrounded by the people and places where I had spent so much time of my own creative history. The work of both Artists is so vastly different and their process and materials are worlds apart from each other, but somehow visiting with them is an adventure into their combined creative process and vision, and like traveling to different planets in the solar system the experience works very well together as a whole.

Dana is developing a new series of work, some things that she has had in her mind for a while. As I've written before, I love the way that Dana's mind imagines and sees life because it is just not the same as the way my own or anyone else's does. She has such a unique vision and such a wonderful way of seeing the world. Her new work is exploring at times a type of psychedelia, with a Warhol Banana in more glittery and cosmic colors and spin paintings created on her own custom designed contraption that uses the mechanism of a fan for its spinning wheel and motor. Iconic imagery and fragmented Barbie Dolls float through some of her created cosmos skies, while words and language tell stories and make statements that give us a moment to reflect on language itself.

Alice's vision and her work are very different, but a similar quality of being so incredibly unique makes visiting with her and Dana together very refreshing. Alice is a photographer, and the series that she is working on combines footage that she has created using models, sometimes herself, in different environments and thoughtful or dreamlike stages. She layers the images, at times playing with the exposure or the shutter speed, slowing things down so that the images have a quality of being almost film-like. I kept thinking of Andy Warhol when I looked at her work, and she also adds another dimension of words and language to layer onto the images, taking passages from Ovid and working with her own knowledge of the classics and the help of a classics professor at Columbia University to find a translation that brings the words into a language that fits the world and life and experience of today. She described the process as being one that brings her back in her own memory to the time when she was in school, studying the classics and searching for translations for certain pieces that spoke to her and seemed to come alive in her present day life. The resulting images combined with language are beautiful and thoughtful, creating a life of their own and an inner world of stories within stories that feel both contemporary and timeless.

In this time of such great upheaval and uncertainty, to have Artists be in this space creating art feels in some way revolutionary and historic. As I've written before, Art is healing and powerful, and the Artists who share their unique voices and vision are capable of bringing light and healing into the world.

Dana Gambale And Alice Hepburn

At ESKFF At Mana Contempory

888 Newark Avenue

Jersey City, New Jersey

http://danagambale.com

https://www.instagram.com/aliceokhepburn

https://www.eskff.com