Thoughts on Change
Three friends with distinct painting practices are coming together for a residency united by a core pursuit - exploring change. Not just craving change, but committing to allowing it to permeate their work and lives. Change is central to the act of painting itself - from materials and techniques, to more metaphysical shifts in mood, balance, control and perhaps most significantly, place and perspective. This residency is fundamentally about sharing time together in a new environment, witnessing how each other's work has evolved, and being open to how their art can adapt through dialog and changed contexts. What binds this group is an openness in their approaches, a conversational studio attitude emphasizing learning, call-and-response and a spirit of play. Above all, it is an immersion in the catalyzing nature of change itself.
Participating Artists:
Drea Cofield is a Brooklyn-based painter who explores the boundaries between inner subjectivity and external realities. Through careful observation, she investigates the human desire to look, to be seen, and to find meaning within broader contexts. Her work is deeply rooted in observational practice, which informs her understanding of color, form, and the implicit and explicit presence of human experience. Cofield's tender approach to painting reveals the interconnected nature of perception and connection.
Kati Gegenheimer is a Philadelphia-based painter who creates works that suspend time through familiar structures like calendars and musical staffs, transformed by symbolic colors and emphatic brushstrokes. Her paintings function as altars to fleeting moments, uniting elements of landscape, portrait, and still life to create poetic meditations on modern experience through flattened space.
Dustin Metz is a Los Angeles-based painter who works primarily in oil, creating distinct bodies of work that explore subjects ranging from existential fruit to disembodied wildfire smoke and massive bibles. Complementing his paintings, Metz creates mixed-media collages using inkjet printouts of his phone photographs, which he augments with gouache to integrate diverse imagery into cohesive photographic spaces. Through both mediums, he investigates layered space and time while experimenting with new approaches to image-making.
Dustin, Drea and Kati hosted a delicious dinner for Yaddo Residents and local community members. The evening concluded with a sunset swim and fireside chats.
Using kayaks as their preferred mode of transportation, the group spent their days island hopping in search of the best sites to paint.
Painting by Drea Cofield
Painting by Dustin Metz
“...Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.”
-W.B. Yeats
Paintings and collages by Dustin Metz