Artist Statements

I strive to create pieces that evoke a sense of wonder, inviting viewers to pause, reflect, and immerse themselves in the scene before them and become involved in the story.

Working primarily with acrylics and mixed media, I embrace bold colors and dynamic compositions to convey movement and life. Inspired by the ever-changing hues of the natural world, I use layering and texture to bring depth and emotion into my paintings. My artistic process is intuitive—each piece evolves organically, shaped by both intention and spontaneity.

Through my art, I hope to inspire a renewed appreciation for the beauty in our surroundings and the emotions they stir within us. My goal is not just to depict a subject, but to translate an experience—one that resonates with the viewer in a deeply personal way.

The visual rhythms in this work are amplified by an imaginative grid of possibility where control and invention exist together. The edges of shape are defined by a framework where precision intersects with spontaneity. The ordinary and the sublime, the faded and the persistent, the overlapped and the divided— conceptually collide.

These layered compositions present something new and something gone bridged by conflicting generations of color—where bold hues meet softened, faded tones—where reinterpreted narratives allow for reimagined identities.

Beginning as a high school student, Lauren Bergman was involved in art courses at the Corcoran School of Art. Her talents and mature narratives quickly landed her gallery exhibitions in Washington, D.C. at Capricorn Gallery, exhibiting among renowned American realists, including Burton Silverman and Sondra Freckelton. Bergman’s work has been featured in publications ranging from The New York Times to Juxtapoz. She has had three solo exhibitions at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York, which represented her for a decade. Other solo and two-person exhibitions include Makor Gallery and Tria Gallery in New York and the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles. Her many group shows include Plus One Gallery in London, Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago, and Jonathan Levine Gallery and Claire Oliver Fine Art in New York.

Bergman grew up in the Washington metro area, where she studied at the Corcoran School of Art. She earned her bachelor’s degree in fine arts and education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, graduating summa cum laude, and her master’s degree at Smith College before relocating to Manhattan to study painting and design at FIT and The Art Students League. Bergman now lives in a converted pickled herring factory in the West Village and has a studio at Mana Contemporary.

My practice employs combining physical (real) and digital (virtual) material (images). I start by producing multiple paintings. The paintings are photographed and converted to digital media. Once in this form I may merge them as layers, add new elements. Final output ranges from archival prints to projection. Experimentation is key in pursuing alternative forms of representation to conventional painting.

I grew up in Manhattan on the bustling, multi-cultural Upper West Side. Both my parents worked in Theater Arts, and our neighborhood was home to many visual artists and musicians. I attended the Art Students League on 57th street in Manhattan as a child, then continued at the Fiorello Laguardia High School of Music and Art, and majored in Fine Arts at the City College of New York.

The sounds, culture and multitude of characters that I interacted with on a daily basis have greatly influenced my choice of subject as a painter. My work consists of studies of the human condition, the duality of separateness and isolation vs our innate connectedness to each other both physically and emotionally. I am particularly interested in understanding the experiences expressed by women in their work. As women, our choices of subject, medium, color and style are influenced by both our individual and group perceptions of our environments and the way we are regarded within them. Through the eyes, the set of the face, the posture or the gesture, I seek to connect my own truths with those of my subjects.

I work predominantly with oils on canvas and now live in Germantown N.Y.

Like Saturn’s rings, our culture is formed from billions of individual elements. At first glance, we appear to orbit together in a tapestry of golden harmony, but upon closer inspection, we are in a constant state of collision and fragmentation.

Ideas, beliefs, and values crash into one another, breaking apart into smaller fragments through a slow, inevitable erosion process. Over time, even the most formidable structures and ideas are reduced to dust.

Yet within this chaos, there’s a counterforce: connection. Just as mutual gravitational pull causes fragments to clump together, I aspire to create moments of togetherness through my art. This fragile and fleeting accretion is an act of defiance against entropy—a refusal to let constant fragmentation have the final word.

Through observation, curiosity, and creativity, I uncover moments when something whole is created—when connection emerges from chaos, even if only for an instant.

Dust may win in the end, but it’s in my nature to try. And in trying, I find meaning.

They were spontaneously created from a Valentine’s Day bouquet, at the beginning of the Covid shutdown in 2020. I needed a friend, a happy face to distract me, make me feel better. I started drawing with flowers, leaves and stems. One face led to another fashioned from that first bouquet then from flowers and vegetables which grew in my garden here in Saugerties. Face after face appeared. I studied their Latin names, the botanical identities grouping flora with their families and ancestors. Each flower’s folklore and symbolism brought me closer to human connection. There were so many of these new “friends” I decided to make a postcard book entitled Flora Has Feelings which was self-published in 2023.

Working with light, shadow, and form, I prefer to use the tonality of black and white to preserve the beauty of a newborn or the eyes of a toddler and some super cute moments in soft color of a 3 year old cuddling her Teddy bear. Always envisioning how the light and shadow and composition enhances the art of photography.

Black and white photography and subtle color is what I most enjoy working with.

The mid-sixties saw the first “Earthworks in the Tidal Zone” on Martha’s Vineyard Island, where I mimicked sea kelp dancing among rocks and laid out in unique patterns each time the tide receded. In the 70s I kayaked among sea lions and icebergs in Prince William Sound, Alaska. When the huge Exxon Valdez crude oil spill destroyed life on that coast I made an angry, visceral painting, which was later paired in a visual/audio collaboration with world-renowned contemporary classical composer, George Tsantakis.

In 2012, the modern dance piece, “Sea Ghosts” by choreographer, Ellen Sinopoli, premiered at the “Egg” in Albany with my set design. This was a multi-collaboration of dance, contemporary sound composition, costume design and my art from the “Deep Ocean/Deep Space” series, enlarged to 15′ x 20′ as the backdrop. It was at this point that I re-engaged with the genre of environmental installation, focused on describing the endless motion of water, while linking this to the recurring threats of chemical and oil spills. These temporary installations were documented in stills and video, from which I produced a six-minute video discussing the relationship of my life as an explorer, environmental activist, painter and environmental installation artist. The video reveals how all of these aspects of who I am authenticate one another.

As with all my work, my pet paintings use humor, imperfect lines and unexpected
perspectives to create tension. I often sculpt layers of paper mache or polymer clay onto panels and use modest materials, such as cardboard from Amazon boxes and craft materials, to build up the surface and reflect the scale of the stories. Objects may playfully pop out or extend beyond the panel’s border.

I find inspiration in Faith Ringgold, who used varied and humble tools to make bold statements, and Grayson Perry, for his subversive wit and diverse practice. I also love the painterly interiors of Pierre Bonnard and Edvard Munch.

This constant act of searching, scrolling, and assembling is also commonly used in terms of objecthood. People love to collect things, hoard things, and display them as decoration. I am very interested in this idea of “thing power”, which is described in Jane Bennett’s writing, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, as “the active role of nonhuman materials in public life”. Bennett also discusses the draw hoarders find from amassing objects and the power they can hold. These ideas connect to Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic theories about cuteness in her book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, where she writes about the seductive quality of cute objects, how they can draw one in because of their diminutive qualities that make people want to care for them. Exploring further this object-based research and the concept of “tchotchkes,” a Yiddish word for decorative trinkets, and their relationship with memories and the self is something I am very passionate about. Tchotchkes serve as collected treasures, acquired trinkets and rediscovered photos. They become a documentation and archive of personal objects.

I’m interested in the things we keep. I want to keep everything: plastic smurf, butterfly ring, orange marble, ferry ticket, lost tooth in a pink treasure chest. Why did I keep these useless, often cheap objects? They offer safety, nostalgia, and comfort lying in the specific memories and cultural associations tied to them. The lone dangly earring that my grandma gave me, the small sheet of stickers shared with a sweet love. These hard, plastic objects are made warm and comforting, something cute to protect and hold onto. I intend to create an archive of sentimental objects in the form of small series hand-bound book projects, collected photos, and video footage exploring this process of “gleaning the self”, finding memories within old forgotten material. These collections share stories and memories, and documenting stories and sifting through stuff are some of my favorite things to do!

There is humor here, but also longing. A flicker of recognition. A sense that something has been lost, or maybe misplaced—like a half-forgotten dream, returning in fragments, only to vanish again.

I approach sculpture as both a physical and conceptual experiment—melding organic forms with circuitry, creating hybrids of nature and machine. My work often invites interaction, using sensors or audiovisual feedback to engage viewers in real-time. By blending the familiar with the otherworldly, I aim to provoke curiosity about the systems that shape our world, from the deep time of planetary forces to the fleeting signals that pulse through our devices.

Metallic foil is something I enjoy using in my oil paintings. It adds a reflective light element that resembles the sky and water, attempting to echo nature’s constantly shifting range of tones and colors.

Today, the tactile qualities of painting are increasingly translated into digital spaces, compared to works created by hand on computers, or even to the impersonal calibrations of AI. This series of cotton candy-colored paintings, inspired by depictions of my beloved poodle, Lady, embraces the hyper-saturated hues of rainbows, balloons, and jewel-toned fantasies. Beneath this sweetness, however, is a tension—a response to the surreal nature of a world that often feels so unreal, it threatens to burst.

Photographing a wild animal provides a different challenge and requires patience and a process of gaining the animal’s trust. I have been lucky enough to discover my artistic passion right outside my door, in my own backyard. I have always had this connection with animals and a unique sense of humor, and I feel this work best represents both.

I am an artist that doesn’t believe that all artwork must be serious. I love to highlight the more whimsical aspects of life and add in an element of humor or absurdity, since that is my favorite part of being human. My photographs and sculptures allow me to share and celebrate that feeling with others.

Kitsch is generally defined by its “poor taste”, whereas Cute, by its very intention, offers imagery of an endearing quality

Cute often contains child-like, youthful or delicate compositional elements, it is not intended to offend or disgust the viewer

Cute brings us an intimacy with the subject, often in ways that tug at our emotions in a way that our intellect cannot define

My work offers a tiny, idealized universe where the demands of “normal” are not only unnecessary but openly discarded. This is the cosmos where the arbitrary lines between genders, species and even the laws of the physical world are far away. Here we may openly bathe in the pinkish glow of pure love.

I am interested in making sensory, evocative paintings. Guided by instinct and sensation I explore the language of color, its formal and emotional qualities. Irresistibly drawn to the luscious physicality of the pigment, I employ a super-saturated palette, smooth glossy texture
and fluid movement wherein the formal elements yield to the sensuous nature of the composition.

The work is process driven, a tricky balance of intention versus chance. It is an experiment in mark-making: between the unpredictable behavior of the materials and the idiosyncrasies of my gesture. The nature of the medium necessitates all decisions be made in the moment.

I seek to create an ambiguous situation where familiar yet elusive biomorphic forms both imply and defy a narrative. And so, allowing a space for the work to continue unfolding beyond the initial visceral experience.

My sculpture is a magical mystical journey of my mind. Research for photo images of the animal is first. Once that is established it is an organic process. Seeing what will happen and unfold as I go along in my creative process is the enjoyment of sculpting.

Three themes have played throughout her life informing her work art: humor, process, and food. She uses humor to cope with adversity, to make social connections, express ideas, and when necessary, as a weapon. She cycles between abstract and representational, sometimes blurring the boundaries.

Parker loves to play with new materials and techniques, mixing and matching and pushing the boundaries or inventing new ways that they can be used. Making food is both an act of crafting and an intellectual activity expressed in food writing, but always done with humor. She began unconsciously, and later with intent, to incorporate these aspects of herself into her work. I aspire to have my art be part of the visual tradition of satire and social commentary. She gravitates towards reclaimed discards of nature and humans which also represent how humans have used, and more often than not, abused nature. If there is an opportunity to include food, she’ll never pass it up.

Her work has been shown extensively throughout the Hudson Valley including solo shows at the Wired Gallery, High Falls and a two person show at the Ask Gallery, Kingston. For more information visit: https://www.suzanneparkerart.com.

My new work resides in the spaces in-between.

The past/present/future collide. The traditional landscape is fragmented and filtered through the landscape of the body and of the mind. My thoughts are of time, memory, dream space, the body, nature, and environment. I consider these to be landscapes of a different sort.

These constructions are endearing, but there’s an odd undercurrent of feeling menace or dread. Are these characters friend or foe?

It has the following advantages over other forms of painting: you can do it in bed; and no brushes to clean.

And there’s a third advantage, one you might not think of right away. As a writer, I’m used to a lot of flexibility. I can start to write a poem in free verse, then decide that it might work better if I gave it a little rhyme, a little meter, and the next thing you know, it’s a sonnet. I can – as I’m doing right now – start to write a novel that takes place in two different time periods, and then, when I’m two thirds of the way through, decide that each era needs its own separate novel, and start to tear the novel apart and make two novels out of it. With a painting, you can’t really do that. If you get a 16×20 canvas, and put it on your easel, you can do all sorts of things to it. You can add colors, you can change shapes, you can paint over the whole thing and start over. But you’re always going to be doing it within a 16×20 frame.

Not so with digital painting. I can start with a horizontal image of a nude under a tree, decide I don’t like the way it’s going, crop out the tree – or the nude – and keep going with my new vertical image. Which is fine until I decide that what the painting really needs is seven or eight more nudes – or trees – at which point I use my “Resize Canvas” command, and change the shape of my image from 8” x 5” to 8” x 18”. This happens more often than you might think.

The image on the left started out more or less square, of a guy standing up against the wall of a house, with a doorway to his right. But then I decided I needed another figure, maybe someone in the doorway. But the doorway was way too small for that, so I extended the canvas out to the right, and I was able to add my second figure. At which point the doorway wasn’t really a doorway anymore, but that was OK. It didn’t have to be. But that meant that the house wasn’t really a house anymore, so I didn’t need quite as much of it. So it was time to resize the canvas again, this time lopping off a big chunk over on the left. Try that with your mural, or your easel painting.

I was in a jazz club once, with the musician/artist Jeremy Steig. Jeremy started doodling something on a napkin, and soon he was in the grip of a creative frenzy, and when he ran out of napkins, but not out of ideas, he grabbed another one, and kept going. Then another, and another. Top, bottom, left, right. It was thrilling to watch. I saved all the napkins and took them home. But I was never able to recreate the same order.

About my work:
I’ve always been a writer first, and a storyteller, and that storytelling urge has carried over into my graphic art. But when I draw or paint, I think with my hands. I don’t consciously work through a story; I trust that the story will be there, and that others will find it.

Victoria Schuster-Henshaw
There is something hypnotizing and engulfing about a miniature world. It provides an escape from the bigness and the harshness of life, pushing you to shift your focus and land softly on the minutiae. Blending the fantastical with the tangible, miniature scenes like this allow one to vacation in childhood for a moment again.

In my work, I handcraft almost every object (save exactly eight) using a multitude of upcycled materials. Finding and transforming forgotten items that would have otherwise been fated for a landfill feels comforting in its own way; to be plucked from detritus and placed lovingly in a space of appreciation and renewed purpose is a vicarious dream realized.

This piece is specifically inspired by an early childhood memory of mine: whenever I would wait in the cold or the rain for the school bus, I would stick my little hands in my little coat pockets and would imagine they were tiny mice sitting in a tiny chair in front of a tiny fire. It always kept me warm.

My new body of work includes approximately two years of medication that I have ingested then incorporated into the canvases and into provocative sexualized mannequins and then rubberized in a flesh-like substance. Psychological dependence on medications as well as the miracle of medical science in disease is always artistically explored through metaphors and symbolic imagery of the work and the medical reliance and self-control and the struggle for autonomy over one’s body.

Reoccurring themes of being human in mental and physical sickness, fear, addiction, anxiety and trauma taking all this and transforming them to beautiful paintings in what I now call dolly displays. The surreal paintings show dreamlike landscapes and transport viewers to places where the boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, offering a mental escape from the constraints of the real world.

Art is nothing for me without humor. I feel it is the responsibility of my work to not only myself but of myself to be of course a commentator or historian of current affairs and emotional climates. BUT for most it is imperative to be fun. It needs to be a fun ride for people to laugh out loud and enjoy these works no matter how disturbing. I often hear they are beautiful and horrifying! This is life and that is a compliment. A basic compliment but praise nonetheless.

This is my personal belief as I grow as an artist.

However hilariously beautiful these works seem they are riddled with the human condition in all success and failure, desire and sickness. I am a reclaimed ‘New Feminist Surrealist’ and I unveil the psychological, physical, and intellectual truths of the female mind in shrine-like installations. I explore the raw, fragmented realities of the female psyche through organic forms, rubberized mannequins, collage and symbolic artifacts, revealing hidden thoughts, desires, and vulnerabilities.

Experience humor, horror, and humanity in an immersive sanctuary of surreal art.

The most stimulating thing for me is the diversity of how I see and the often unexpected result. It’s exciting to engender an idea, see it take shape, often taking on a new identity. I love the mechanics, invention, process and developing narrative. Sometimes I use myself as a subject.

The gratifying thing, apart from seeing my work on public display, is to participate in the conversation…and always, interpretations will vary. Come to the gallery, have a chat.

For the past 30 years, I have been designing, assisting, and directing art projects, classes, and programs for all age groups. Now that I have retired, I am dedicating more time to my own artmaking process. Originally trained as a printmaker, I am now expanding my practice to include painting, gelli monoprinting, and mixed media, allowing me to explore new techniques and artistic expressions.