12/01/2023
🌟Makers Spotlight🌟
Liza Cassidy & Rebecca Gembarowski
Liza Cassidy teaches at The River Gallery School and works from her studio at the Cotton Mill in Brattleboro VT, where her grandmother Frances Denault used to work at the weaving machines also on the second floor. Born and raised in southern Vermont, Liza also lived for 17 years in Brooklyn, New York, working and raising a family, she maintained a studio practice of abstract and mixed media collage engaging with the art community in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn and the experimental theater community in Chelsea NYC, she has painted plein air oil landscapes in the summer months in southern VT for the last 15 years.
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Dance was the art form that Rebecca Gembarowski had her first formal training in, however, she has always made things. As a young adult she studied ceramics and continued to be focused on dance. In her late twenties, she entered college with the intention ofexploring and learning about painting and sculpture. After struggling for two and a half years, she realized she felt disconnected from the process, and returned to dance in her remaining time there. Interestingly, her study of visual art changed her experience of dance as she began to view dance through an external lens instead of solely as the medium for someone else’s choreography. She began to see the stage as a huge moving canvas with sets, lights,costumes, and dancers becoming my palette and medium.It wasn’t until several years later, in a sequencing workshop with Lydia Thompson, that she reconnected with her curiosity about and love for painting. She found RiverGallery School’s philosophy and approach to making in tune with her own process, and soon enrolled in an encaustic class. Five years ago, she found a studio space at the Cotton Mill where she can make and leave a mess, and work for a few uninterrupted hours a week. In that sanctuary of a space, she has been working in oil and coldwax, and encaustic. Works being shown this Decemberinclude new works from the “Dream Charting” and “LinearA” series, as well as some older works.
Studio A 259 Cotton Mill Open Studios & Holiday Sale Dec 2 / 10am-4pm
