PHANTASMA

40 Artist group show opening August 16 with opening reception 5-8pm

Phantasma is a multidisciplinary group exhibition showcasing the work of over 40 artists, primarily from New York’s Hudson Valley, with select contributors from across the United States. United under the theme of “phantasma”—a term evoking the spectral, illusory, and dreamlike. The exhibition explores the unstable boundaries between perception and reality, presence and absence, the material and the imagined.

Featuring a dynamic range of media including painting, sculpture, and multi media works, Phantasma foregrounds artistic practices that engage with the uncanny, the subconscious, and the ephemeral.

In Phantasma, ephemerality is not solely embedded in the materials or lifespan of the artworks, but more crucially, in the temporality of the viewer’s encounter. Even the most materially permanent works become ephemeral through the lens of perception. The time one spends with a piece, the subjective attention one brings to it, and the emotional or psychological states it evokes are all transient, unrepeatable phenomena.

This viewer-centered ephemerality aligns closely with the exhibition’s thematic core. The concept of phantasma implies not just illusion or apparition, but a kind of fleeting mental image that is something glimpsed and then gone. In this light, the exhibition invites reflection on how art exists not just as an object in space, but as an event in time—a momentary convergence between work and witness.

Such moments are inherently unstable. No two viewings are the same; no two viewers see the same thing. Light shifts, sound overlaps, distractions arise, memories intervene. Even in a static work, meaning is never fixed—it shimmers, disappears, reemerges elsewhere. Phantasma engages this instability as a mode of presence, encouraging the viewer to lean into the impermanence of attention, the fragility of focus, and the shifting textures of perception.

Here, ephemerality becomes less about what the work is, and more about what it does in time, how it lives briefly in the field of experience before dissolving into memory.

image

Lauren Kolesinskas

Nature Abhors A Vacuum

Acrylic on canvas

16” x 20”

2024