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April 3 – April 21, 2024

Opening Reception: Wednesday April 3, 2024 at 6pm – 9pm

Walk Through: Saturday April 6, 2024 at 2pm

Panel Discussion: Wednesday April 17, 2024 at 7pm
with Amy Talluto.
Amy Talbot is a painter and sculptor who lives and works in Upstate NY. In 2018 the was awarded a NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship in Painting and was an Art Forum Critics Pick for her solo exhibition at Black & White Gallery. She has recently shown her work at Auxier Kline Gallery, Jeff Bailey Gallery, The Berkshire Botanical Gardens, the Samuel Dorsey Museum, Geoffrey Young Gallery and Wave Hill Gardens, She is the host and producer of the Pep Talks for Artists Podcast.

Closing Reception: Sunday April 21, 2024 at 5pm – 7pm

Featured Artists: Elisabeth Condon, Susan Luss, Alyse Rosner

Mind Leaves Body features works by three painters who explore nature, city dwelling, and décor through creative processes that blur distinctions between inside and outside, interior and exterior, and intuition and physicality. Their flexible, large-scale pieces propose, in the words of essayist Paul D’Agostino, that, “If it sometimes seems as though the artist’s mind leaves the artist’s body, then it’s because the artist’s mindless body is often the more fluidly productive one in the studio.”

Review by Art Spiel

When Elisabeth Condon noticed an Open Call for a show at Westbeth, she immediately thought of artists Alyse Rosner and Susan Luss, whose process-oriented approach perfectly matched her vision for a collaborative project. They all agreed to come together, planning to let the installation unfold over four days, allowing their work to merge and shape the exhibition dynamics. Their setup process—discussing, reshaping, and improvising in the gallery—revealed more profound interconnections. The trio’s improvisational method produced an exciting viewing experience analogous to a live jazz ensemble with distinct leitmotifs.em>aces of exteriority.” Additionally, the exhibition highlights the concept of décor—each artist engaging uniquely with this theme, further invigorating the dialogue between their works.

Link to full review Mind Leaves Body

Selected Images

Click for slideshow

Elisbeth Condon
Transporters
2023
Reupholstered red chairs, wood extension, polymer medium lattice 76h x 21w x 28d inches

Susan Luss
Still Life with Fruits and Pitcher>br/> 5 x 5 inches

Susan Luss
A Stake in the Ground
144 x 216 inches

Alyse Rosner Flare
2024
Graphite and acrylic on canvas 65 x 72 inches

Elisabeth Condon
Folded Flower
2024
Acrylic mediums on linen 60 x 40 inches

Alyse Rosner
Pixie Dust and No Man's Land
2024
Graphite and acrylic on canvas

For the three artists in Mind Leaves Body, catalyzing a state of creative flow is instantiated by variables in materials, process, and thematic focus. Primary among these matters is a rather simple one: scale. Condon, Luss, and Rosner find that working on large surfaces is not only an immersive process, but also a transportive one reflective of the vastness of the urban and natural spaces that inspire them. Scale carries over into the viewing experience as well: the artists’ large formats of unstretched canvas or paper are too expansive to take in all at once, introducing time as an active element in engaging with the work. Adapting modernist traditions such as abstraction and jazz to a time of algorithms and information ubiquity, the artists use improvisational working methods to channel their direct experience. Whether pouring, dying, staining, layering, or inscribing, the artists reimagine and reanimate landscape, infusing it with ecstatic dynamism while losing themselves in the process.

Elisabeth Condon filters Manhattan’s flora and fauna through decorative wallpapers evoking the types of interiors familiar to her since childhood. Her abrupt transitions between poured areas, patterns, and invented and stylized forms compress space, while also bringing unlike elements into coherence in ways that landscapes do as well. Susan Luss synthesizes architecture and painting by imprinting the buzz of the city on large canvases she wraps, drapes, or spontaneously performs with, fusing art and life. Her works are recontextualized for site-specific locations, whether urban landscapes, her Brooklyn studio, or exhibition spaces. Alyse Rosner sets her layering process into motion starting with rubbings from beloved trees and enormous leaves near her home in Connecticut. The makeshift prints furnish a base layer for her expansive surfaces, which she then stains with color and inscribes with undulating lines until explosive forms materialize, bringing real and imagined spaces into convergence.

Condon, Luss, and Rosner know that creative flow isn’t something that can be fabricated, forced, or even sufficiently described. But it is certainly something that can be felt and cultivated in the studio. For them, immersive scale provides a state of flow, channeling synesthetic impulses for the mind to process while the body does its thing.
– Mind Leaves Body will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D.

Elisabeth Condon lives and works in New York City. She is the recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation and Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grants. Her paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Hudson River Museum, United States Embassy Beijing, Tampa Museum of Art, and Perez Art Museum Miami. Condon’s public commissions include MTA Art & Design Percent for Art, Norte Maar Collaboration for the Arts, and Tribeca Film Institute’s Storefront Art Recovery Initiative (STAR). Her NYCT Ditmars-Astoria subway station design is currently on view as a 2024 selection for the Poetry in Motion series. Condon’s work is represented by Emerson Dorsch.

Susan Luss is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. She has had solo exhibitions at Lowe Mill Arts in Huntsville, Alabama, and Museum of Art and Culture in New Rochelle, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions such at M. David & Co., New York; Union Grove Gallery, University of Alabama, Huntsville, Alabama; The Painting Center, New York; James Howe Gallery, Kean University, Union, New Jersey; Westbeth Gallery, New York; The Hole, New York; Living and Learning Gallery, Burlington, VT; and Kibbee Gallery, Atlanta, GA. Luss’s work is held in public and private collections including Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and La Table des Artists, Paris, France, among others.

Alyse Rosner has had seven solo exhibitions at Rick Wester Fine Art, New York, since 2012. Other solo venues include ARC Fine Art, Mark W. Potter Gallery, Artspace, The Gallery at Three Rivers, Westport Arts Center, and Washington Art Association. Her work has been featured in group shows at Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans; Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, Connecticut; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; BravinLee Programs, New York; Odetta Gallery, New York; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; Artspace, New Haven, CT; and Barbara Krakow Gallery / Krakow Witkin, Boston, MA. Rosner’s work is held in the collections of Google Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Eastern Connecticut State University, NYU Langone Health, The Fine Art Collection at Montefiore Einstein, The Kirkpatrick Bank Collection, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, Aramco Americas, and The Connecticut Artist Collection.