For 12 years, Pulse has been dedicated to celebrating life on Long Island. From the first issue, our region’s arts and culture has been central to that mission. For as many years, this segment has cast a light on emerging artists pushing boundaries, exploring new methods and experimenting as much with their tried and true techniques as with new ones. This feature has changed name, shape and scope over the years, but it has remained true to its DNA. It’s by design it appears in each anniversary edition, which is also our annual Arts & Culture issue. Each year, we receive hundreds of nominees to be considered for inclusion. Friends in the art world, collectors and fellow art hounds send me those that are doing something new, something different and something special. The results are narrowed until finally we have a select group who have distinguished themselves both through their work and the success of their exhibitions as well as through the thoughts they are narrating. It never ceases to surprise me how certain commonalities are found. The artists live very different lives, in very different corners of our region and they are arting with very different motives. Yet, connections are made, which may in fact be the truest testament of what art is really about: holding a mirror to our collective consciousness, creating visual time stamps of the body politic, raging in color the prevailing feelings of our time and place. This year, music runs through it all. And motion. And risk taking. The artists you’re about to meet are inviting you to transcend—from wherever you are, to wherever it is you really want to go. Follow them.
Josh Dayton
Mixed Media / Bridgehampton
Josh Dayton works in the emotional, not analytical, tearing through his art one panel at a time. image: adam weiss
“I am interested in architecture. And building. I like all the very interesting detailing and the styles and all that. It all works together. This all happens at once. When I first started in art school, they were trying to teach you that these things are broken up. I tried to break down the painting and I realized that everything is together, nothing is really separate and shapes, colors—they are all integral. You can’t really separate them.” Click to meet him
Michele Bonelli
Painter / Long Island City
image: adam weiss
“These are basically what I was doing up to around 9/11. They are based on language, music. The idea was to create a body of work that had no top, no bottom, no left, no right. The collector, he puts the pieces together in any sequence—do anything they wanted with them. They become a final statement when they are assembled. It’s kind of like the way language works: you get letters, the letters become words, the words become sentences, the sentences become paragraphs and you just keep building on it.” Click to meet her
Geoff Kuzara
Sculptor / East Hampton
Engineering informs Geoff Kuzara’s carefully crafted sculptures. image: adam weiss
A straight line can be drawn from the big open skies over northern Wyoming to the sculptural mobiles of Geoff Kuzara. Like the clouds cascading over the Big Horn Mountains where this former packer would roam, his simple but elegant works graze in their open spaces. He’s trying to catch light through elemental machines rendered in wood or steel, or a combination of the two. They are always moving and always changing as the glint of light falls upon them and they slice through the air around them. Click to meet him
Valerie Zeman
Textiles / Huntington
Valerie Zeman dyes each fabric different colors to create her patterns. image: adam weiss
“I like the tactile quality of it and I like the simplicity of it. One of my favorite patterns is log cabin. Which is just square, the middle represents the hearth of the home. It is usually red, but I kind of took it a little bit further than that. You can touch it, you can wrap yourself in them, and you know the colors and the stitching. My work…I took it from quilt making to more of an art form. That’s also the beauty of textiles, you can reimagine it, you can cut it up and you can put it back together. You can work on it again.” Click to meet her
Robert “Mojo” Mojeski
Sculptor / Southampton
image: adam weiss
Robert Mojeski is looking for a way to forge his connection with the ocean through sculpture. He is devising kinetic, fluid structures that convey a sense of energy, whether or not they are moving. Mojo started his life as an offshore commercial fisherman and is continuing that chase through metal. He says he is stuck on fluidity and he is recycling materials to create another layer of rejuvenation. Even the fluidity of time is an element in his artistic context. Click to meet him
John Haubrich
Painter / East Hampton
image: adam weiss
John Haubrich is embracing both additive and subtractive processes to render panels that are free from representation despite being autobiographical narratives. He’s adding to scratch away in order to create landscapes grounded in floral elements. He’s a constant gardener: planning, attempting to control but ultimately succumbing to natural process. Click to meet him
Martha McAleer
Painter / Hampton Bays
image: adam weiss
Even the most abstract art is about something. It could be a mood; it could be a color study. It could be about nothing, which is still a statement the artist is conscientiously making. In the case of Martha McAleer, her abstractions are about happiness. “I like to make things that make people feel happy. I see so many people have so many problems and I like to give them something that brings them peace.” Click to meet her