The Re Institute is pleased to present the work of artists connected by friendship and marriage. The purpose of this season is to explore whether friendship affects art making. As with all shows curated at The Re Institute we will see. Both Itty and Bill are involved in portraying time and its power to erode. Water being the linking medium. Both show us the beauty of the long process.

“We met in 1994 at an opening in Soho, like so many artists of our generation. We spent some years circling around each other’s orbits, spiraling towards a unified whole. Over time our partnership in life and work further mingled, moments turning into days, months and eventually years. Now our shared lives resemble parallel raindrops landing in a pond forming two adjoining ripples radiating outward and combining into a Venn diagram that describes our life.”

Bill Schuck artist statement:

My own hands have very little to do with the final form of my pieces. Instead my work follows its own course to completion through mechanical automation. Using industrial pumps and electronic switches, my apparatus dispenses fluids, some additives like ink and some corrosive like bleach or vinegar. Running 24 hours a day for months and sometimes years, the process slowly records an image which remains as the sole visual record of this repetitive process. Through the duration of this show the actions of these machines slowly carry the work further away from the beginnings that I set into motion. As the machines run, this automatic process slowly erases my initial conception, leaving me more an observer and steward of this process than its sole author.

Schuck, dispersal 3/24/20, bleach on paper, 2020 24" x 36"

Itty S. Neuhaus artist statement:

The rapid changes in the natural world are the source of my work, whether it is the trickle of a brook that eventually carves through rock, the massive calving of a glacier or the decay and regeneration of my own body. Out in the field, I create a photo-composite of a landscape I have been immersed in. The image is then printed on backlit film. The landscape image is not an end in itself; it is just the memory of a place, the starting point of what I call a scratch-work. Back in the studio, I work into the photographic surface, scratching through the image adds a graphical dimension -- through subtraction -- to the photographic image. Overlaid on the existing landscape, marks accumulate to create the contours of an altogether new landscape, an alternate reality to the printed photographic scene. The resulting artwork combines representation and invention to conjure the known and unknown forces at work on our environment.