By Niko Balkaran
Three Hudson Valley artists spent the past six months developing new work at Ann Street Gallery, where a fellowship built around experimentation and collaboration has brought their distinct projects together in a new exhibition.
Elena Kalkova, Duncan Richards and Luis Mercedes Winter make up this year’s class of Ann Street Gallery fellows. The six-month program provides three artists with studio space, a $2,000 stipend, mentorship and an opportunity to develop and exhibit a proposed project while receiving feedback from one another and other artists.
Their work came together in “Tales from the Penumbra: Memories of Shadow-and-Light,” an exhibition that grew out of three individual fellowship projects rather than a predetermined theme. As the work developed, the artists began finding connections in the ways each approached stories and experiences that can sit outside dominant narratives.
“There’s such a hunger for connection in the art world that’s authentic and that is mutual,” Gallery Director Alison McNulty said.
That sense of connection is central to the fellowship, which extends beyond producing work for the gallery. Fellows meet with mentors, participate in decisions about how their work is displayed and continue working together after the exhibition through studio visits, feedback and conversations about their next opportunities.
McNulty said the program does not select artists based on whether their work fits neatly together but instead, the jury looks for artists committed to their work who can benefit from the fellowship’s community, mentorship and opportunities.
The project grew from a broad body of archival research into disappearances from publicly accessible spaces, including memorials, parks, exhibitions and public art for Kalkova. Their research questions how people respond when memories are actively removed from public view.
“How do we address the memories that are actively taken away from us?” Kalkova said. “How do we even know it was there if it’s something that was erased in public space? How do we kind of approach that absence, and how do we learn that there is an absence?”
Kalkova began building an archive of those disappearances before entering the fellowship, collecting examples and links as part of a larger research practice. For the work shown at Ann Street Gallery, she selected a portion of that archive focused on the removal of the “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” exhibit in Philadelphia and the public pushback surrounding efforts to preserve it.
The fellowship helped Kalkova narrow that research into individual projects rather than trying to address the entire archive at once. She said the process showed her that portions of the research could become separate projects without abandoning the larger body of work.
Kalkova’s practice is research-driven and can take different forms depending on the idea she is exploring. They said that approach does not always fit traditional opportunities, which made Ann Street Gallery’s emphasis on community and interdisciplinary practices particularly appealing.
Kalkova’s practice is research-driven and can take different forms depending on the idea she is exploring. They said the nature of that work does not always fit traditional opportunities, which made Ann Street Gallery’s emphasis on community and interdisciplinary practices particularly appealing.
Richards approached the fellowship through their own experience with transition. Their project, “Angels in the Operating Room,” uses the narrative of fallen angels to examine transgender and intersex experiences, with Richards drawing in particular from her own physical transition.
Richards began transitioning at 14 and described herself as part of a generation of young transgender people who experienced a new level of public and media visibility. Their work reflects on the grief Richards associates with that visibility and the gap between representation and material support for transgender people.
“We were put in front of audiences, we were put in front of cameras with no real support or understanding for the fact that we were quite young, talking about very complex things and talking about our identities and giving the world a lot of access to us and our stories and who we were, and I think that part of the show for me is processing the grief of that,” said Richards.
The project also considers trans identity as something spiritual, Richards said, with the fallen-angel imagery allowing her to examine feelings of exclusion and exploitation while maintaining the idea that a person’s body and spirit remain a home even when viewed by people who may not understand them.
The fellowship changed Richards’ process as well. They said they previously struggled with allowing audiences into the personal meaning of their work and often maintained tight control over how it was made and presented. McNulty encouraged them to experiment with materials and become more comfortable with the possibility that something they made might fail, according to Richards.
“I think knowing that no matter what I made, there was still value there,” Richards said.
Mercedes Winter turned to the story of Abraham for his fellowship project, drawing on the Jewish tradition of each generation interpreting religious texts for itself. He said he was frustrated by interpretations that tried to make Abraham’s actions appear justified rather than acknowledging that a person can do good while also causing harm.
Mercedes Winter’s project reimagines the story through drag, with performers taking on the roles of Abraham and Isaac. The approach uses humor while drawing attention to ideas about gender embedded in the story, particularly expectations of masculinity and the power to harm, lie or dominate.
The story also carried a personal connection for Mercedes Winter, who said he grew up in a home with domestic violence.
“I learned that I could love him from a distance, and that would keep my body safe and allow me to love him,” Mercedes Winter said, an idea he wanted to explore through a religious story that he felt was often presented without acknowledging its complications.
Mercedes Winter also changed the way he photographed the project. He typically works outdoors using natural light, but said the costumes and subject matter made interruptions from people passing by particularly disruptive. For the fellowship, he experimented with photographing landscapes and projecting them behind his subjects in the studio, allowing the group to work within a controlled space.
Although Kalkova, Richards and Mercedes Winter entered the fellowship with separate proposals, their work eventually began to reveal common ground. Richards described one of those threads as “speaking from the margin,” with each project questioning dominant narratives and considering voices that can be left outside them.
The exhibition’s title emerged from those conversations. After the work had largely been produced, the fellows and McNulty sat together looking for themes across the three projects. The idea of the penumbra, or the space where light and shadow meet, became a way to describe the territory their work shared.
The exhibition does not mark the end of the six-month fellowship, with the remaining portion of the program including trips to art institutions, studio visits and feedback from artists and other professionals as the fellows consider where to take their work next. Kalkova, Richards and Mercedes Winter are also scheduled to give public artist talks on Oct. 10.