LIVINGSTON MANOR, NY — The Catskill Art Space (CAS) will hold Front of House, an exhibition of new work from Michele Araujo, Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka, on fiew from Saturday, December 2 to Saturday, December 30 in the ground floor galleries. An artists’ talk will be held on December 2 at 3 p.m.

Araujo, Episalla and Yamaoka have known each other since they waited tables in New York City in the 1980s.

An exhibition is a front-of-house activity, said artist Adam Simon. “It is when the work, what artists do, is presented to the viewer.”

The artists interrogate and challenge definitions of painting, sculpture or photography, Simon continued. “They combine ingredients and submit them to processes as much culinary as aesthetic, resulting in much food for thought. 

 Michele Araujo is a painter living in Brooklyn. The beauty achieved through paint, color and gesture is interrupted by the inclusion of external material, collaged images from an array of sources (wallpaper, photos and contact paper) “suggesting both a resistance to making meaning explicit and a love of possibility,” according to CAS.

Araujo has twice been a fellow at Yaddo and has received fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and Art Matters. She is a co-founder of Four Walls, an artists’ forum and exhibition space, the archives of which are housed in the Smithsonian Archive of American Art. 

Joy Episalla (she/they) is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, whose work repositions photography and the moving image into the territory of sculpture, CAS said. “Episalla is interested in transgressing and challenging photographic fixity. Their engagement with the dynamics of transformation, multiplicity and hybridity comes out of the queer feminist position they occupy, and from which the work is activated.”

Carrie Yamaoka is a New York-based visual artist who works across painting, photography and sculpture. “She is interested in the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object,” CAS said.

Catskill Art Space is located at 48 Main St. The exhibition hours are Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Learn more at www.catskillartspace.org.