Posit

A journal of literature and art

David Hornung

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

My paintings are never based on a preparatory sketch or plan. I usually begin with quickly painted shapes, lines, or a configuration. It’s a casual, energetic start and a proposition to contend with. Once I’m locked in, I try to sharpen my focus without extinguishing the life of the nascent image. If I suspend judgement and maintain an open, playful attitude, unexpected pathways emerge, and I can find my way forward.

When I too quickly feel a sense of satisfaction and control, I get suspicious that I’m trading on what I already know; not discovering. When this happens, I need to kill the lovely thing so the unexpected can come into view. It takes a surprising number of adjustments in color and composition along with layering, blotting, scraping, and sanding to arrive at a resolution. It’s the interplay between physicality and thought that makes a painting real.

David Hornung is a painter and collage artist whose work has been widely exhibited in the US and UK. As an educator, he has served on the faculties of The Rhode Island School of Design, Indiana University, Skidmore College, Pratt Institute, and Adelphi University. He is the author of Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers (Laurence King Pub Ltd.), a color theory and practice textbook that has been translated into six languages and is used in art schools and private studios around the world. He shows at the J.J. Murphy Gallery in NYC, Elena Zang Gallery in Woodstock New York, Pulp Gallery in Holyoke Ma., and Cynthia Winings Gallery at Blue Hill, Maine.

Sarah Peters

Posted on May 27, 2025 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

I grew up in a strict religious environment where patriarchal control was cloaked in devotion. That embodied experience of power—how it shapes belief, space, and behavior—continues to inform my sculpture. I work in bronze, a material historically tied to permanence, reverence, and authority. I also work against it, covering it in silver nitrate patinas that shimmer like futuristic machinery.

My figures reference classical form and monumental symmetry, yet they erupt with open mouths, unruly hair, and rear ends. These contradictions—between the ideal and the absurd, the sacred and the playful—disrupt the traditional language of power. I’m interested in how sculpture can both replicate and resist control and how touch, humor, and eros can challenge forms that once demanded reverence.

Ultimately, I see sculpture as a site where control and vulnerability collide—a space to question who holds power, how it operates, and what happens when we interrupt it.

Sarah Peters lives and works in Queens, NY. She is a recipient of awards and residencies including the National Academy Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, John Michael Kohler Artist Residency, WI; New York Foundation for the Arts; The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; and The Sharpe-Wallentas Studio Program.

Solo and two-person exhibitions include Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Fahrenheit Madrid, Spain (2022); Zidoun Bossuyt, Luxembourg (2020); NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, New York, NY (2019); Howards Gallery, Athens, GA (2019); Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, VT (2019); Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY (2018); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY (2017); Eleven Rivington, New York, NY (2015); 4 AM, New York, NY (2015); Bodyrite at Asya Geisberg, New York, NY (2014); and John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY (2013).

Group exhibitions include Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstractions from the Permanent Collection and Beyond, Kansas City, MO (2024); Full Disclosure, Selections from the Thomas Sewall Collection, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND (2024); Vessel, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2024); Destiny’s Glitch, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; High Contrast, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Samaritans, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York, NY (2019); No Patience for Monuments, Perrotin Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2019) Objects Like Us, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2018); and Rodin and the Contemporary Figurative Tradition, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI (2017), among others.

Her work has been reviewed and featured in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and BFA from The University of Pennsylvania and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Elizabeth Hazan

Posted on May 27, 2025 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

My recent paintings explore a range of imagery from my imagination that is partly drawn from memory yet grounded in the experience of nature as it is pushed to extremes. The result sits resolutely in the fertile border between landscape and abstraction.

I spent a lot of time as a child in the East End of Long Island surrounded by open farmland. The empty farm field sits in my mind as a place like the space in the painting; the painting becomes a field where I can grow strange natural forms that suggest trees or weather. The term dream logic feels apt where there are elements, forms or light that feel familiar to the viewer, but things verge on the surreal. I aim for a degree of ambiguity that resists easy naming. My paintings often embody a kind of euphoria, yet I am at once celebrating the beauty of the natural world while we still have it and expressing melancholy at its destruction in our hands.

I want people to see the paint in front of them as opposed to an illusion that feels set and closed. Openness and mutability are also how imagery appears in memory, where things aren’t fixed and bordered, and I have honed a language that reflects this fluidity and playfulness. My fears about the perilous climate seep in to inform the work but are not broadcast in obvious ways. The paintings combine investigative lines and floods of color to create imaginary landscapes that suggest nature off kilter.

I start from ink and watercolor drawings that I approach like a stream of consciousness writing exercise. When I make the drawings, I am thinking as much about how the lines narrate the picture as I am about evoking the light and atmosphere of a specific environment. I create images in the space of the picture rather than attempting realism. Because I work with continuous line making in the drawings, the resulting language verges on cartoon-like, with a plasticity that has been called “as if Milton Avery painted the background of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.”

I work from a hovering, aerial vantage point, picturing the paper as an empty field where I can draw in the dirt with lines that move around the field and then start upwards towards an area that is like a sky, scooping volumes of air with a looping line. I then make small scale oil paintings that attempt to capture the freshness and immediacy of the watercolors, and the way unexpected, unnamable colors flow into each other. I remain open to the ways oil paint is different and change things as I go. From these smaller works, I select some to create larger paintings. I do this all freehand, so each size has different challenges to overcome, and showing some of that struggle is important to me. I want to arrive at a place that is hard won and alive.

Elizabeth Hazan is a New York based visual artist. Her imaginary landscape paintings mix gestural topography with elements of modernist abstraction. The work depicts a version of nature off-kilter, evoking a charged atmosphere, familiar to the viewer yet verging on the surreal.

Hazan was born and raised in New York City and attended Bryn Mawr College and the New York Studio School. She was awarded a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, has twice been a resident of Yaddo and received a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Recent solo shows include Under the Sun, HESSE FLATOW, NY; Sundown, Madoo Conservancy, Sagaponack, NY; High Noon, Duck Creek Art Center, Springs, NY; Body to Land, (two person) Turn Gallery, NY; and Heat Wave, Johannes Vogt Gallery, NY. Recent group shows include Even in Arcadia There I Am at HESSE FLATOW, NY; Blue Hour at Phillips, NY; Mercury Rising, at Bookstein Projects, NY: Trodden Path; HESSE FLATOW East, Amagansett NY; Psychedelic Landscape, Eric Firestone Gallery, NY; and Heat Wave, Johannes Vogt Gallery, NY. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Forbes, Two Coats of Paint, Art Critical, The Brooklyn Rail and The Art Newspaper. She serves as the founder and director of Platform Project Space in Brooklyn, NY.

Steve Greene

Posted on May 27, 2025 by Posit Editor

Already at a speed that would burn us alive (2024)

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Artist’s Statement

I began making paintings again in 2022 after several years of working exclusively on paper. A lot of the same motifs I use in drawings show up in the paintings – strange sculptural architectural shapes, maps, diagrams, constellations, the body, molecular structure. I try my best not to dwell on why I am drawn to the imagery in these works, especially in the early stages of a painting. Too much clarity of purpose, for me, means I am closing off possible avenues of discovery. The titles (which always come after, when I have one foot in the real world) offer clues to the viewer and to myself, but they are only suggested guideposts. I would rather allow the imagery to keep regenerating itself. My goal has always been to make a thing that buzzes and vibrates with a sort of mysterious energy.

I once had a teacher who asked me what I thought about when I was painting. Back then I had no idea how to answer. Right now I’m thinking about making a line straight, but not too straight. I’m thinking the paint is not gliding on the way I want it to, it’s too thin or too thick. I’m wondering if this line is like an illustration, but I’m not even sure what that really means. I’m trying to keep things loose, but then I tighten up. I want spontaneity without sloppiness. I want effort to show, but not too much effort. I want it to look like I care a lot (I do) and I’m working really hard (I am), but like it is flowing out of me with the greatest of ease (it’s not.) I hope to be working on that for a long time – the clock is ticking.

Steve Greene was born in 1955 and grew up in a small farming town in Arkansas. He moved to New York City in 1978, where he studied at Pratt Institute, receiving a BFA in illustration. Greene has had eight solo shows, including four at FROSCH & CO in New York since 2013. His work has been exhibited at SCOPE Basel in Switzerland, The Drawing Center, Art in General, The Alternative Museum, and Adam Baumgold Fine Art in NY, The Brooklyn Museum, Pierogi 2000 in Brooklyn, and other venues, and is represented by numerous corporate and private collections. His work has been reviewed by Two Coats of Paint, The Paris Review, and JJ Murphy. Since 2019 he has lived and worked in the Farmington Valley in Connecticut.

Gregory Rick

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

I see my work as history painting, promoting the obscure, the forgotten, and the common knowledge. My life has been full of tribulations which I look at as initiations. For every hardship I have endured, my art has grown with me. My father went to prison for murder when I was eight years old. Although losing my dad was rough, he left me a book on military history and one on art that started my infatuation with both and served as a means of connection with my pops and provided material for a deeper connection with my mom. Similarly, art was a bastion of light after I returned from Iraq, helping me deal with my guilt about the war.

This work comes from my personal experience, but is not entirely personal. I tell stories that reflect my story but are in dialogue with the wider world, where myth gives voice to the underbelly, the lumpen in tandem displaying the familiar and grandiose. My work tethers together seemingly opposing ideas as I connect the personal, the historical and the political. I am painting on a shaky historical line cemented in humility and conviction. I occupy my pictures with characters who serve as archetypes in conjunction with memory and self-exploration in order to reflect on the absurdity, malleability, and monumentality of history.

Gregory Rick was born in 1981 and grew up in South Minneapolis. Rick received his BFA from CCA, and is currently pursuing his MFA in art practice at Stanford University. Developing a historical imagination and a fondness for drawing stories, Rick collapses history while confronting personal trauma. Rick’s works exist as reflections of his personal experience while being in dialogue with the wider world. Rick has received the Combat Infantry Badge, the Yamaguchi printmaking award, the Nathan Oliveira fellowship, the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, the Artadia Award, the Daedalus award, and the SFMOMA SECA Award, and has shown in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally.

John Einarsen

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

Deep Seeing

John Einarsen has taken many kinds of photographs throughout his life, but for the past 13 years he has incorporated Miksang contemplative photography into his practice. It is concerned with slowing down our minds in order to see the world “as it is.”

“Seeing” is with us each day and a source of great joy. It is a journey of noticing more deeply whatever is around us, understanding and appreciating the essence of things.

What is the source of a contemplative image? When we are able to be still and receptive, the world appears more vivid, like removing grime from a window. There is a gap in thinking, and if the eye, mind, and heart are aligned, a unique perception can arise and manifest naturally. For a brief window the world can appear as it is unfiltered by human constructs, fresh and exhilarating, and be expressed with precision as a photograph. In this way we genuinely connect to the boundless, graceful, and fleeting nature of reality.

This condition can be elusive and is hard to sustain, and on many days is out of reach entirely. The images presented here were taken in those moments of clarity.

John Einarsen has studied “seeing” with the founder of Miksang Contemplative Photography, Michael Wood, and his partner, Julie Dubose, for over a decade. In October 2022, he published a collection of his Miksang photographs, This Very Moment. He has given Miksang workshops in Japan and Luxemboug and spoke about contemplative photography at TEDxKyoto in March 2023.

His recent exhibitions have been “Kyoto Stillness: The Photography of John Einarsen” at the Portland Japanese Garden Gallery, “This Very Moment” at the Shoyeido Kunjyukan Gallery in Kyoto and “Openings” at Komyo-in Temple (with Minako Hiromi and Myong-Hee Kim). He received the Kyotographie Lifetime Achievement in 2024.

Einarsen’s photography books include Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate (with Edith Shiffert and others, 2010), Small Buildings of Kyoto Vol. I & II (2016 and 2017), Zen Gardens and Temples of Kyoto (with John Dougill, 2017), Curtain Motif (2019), and This Very Moment (2022).

Einarsen is also the founding editor of Kyoto Journal which he began with other artists and writers in 1986. Originally from Colorado, he has lived in Kyoto since the early 1980s.

Loren Eiferman

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Posit Editor

Spiraling Borage (2023) — 18v/New Growth (2021)

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Artist’s Statement

We have all at one point or another picked up a stick from the ground—touched the wood, peeled the bark off with our fingernails. My work taps into that same primal desire of touching nature and being close to it. Trees connect us back to nature, back to this Earth.

I start my process with a drawing of an idea. Each morning begins with a walk in the woods surrounding my studio to collect tree limbs and branches that have fallen to the ground. Next, I debark the branch to reveal the shapes that are found within each stick. Using a Japanese hand- saw, I cut and connect these small naturally formed shapes together using dowels and wood glue. Then, all the open joints get filled with a putty, which once dried is then sanded till it’s smooth. This putty and sanding process is repeated at least three times. The new sculpture appears like my original line drawing but in space. I want the work to appear as if it grew in nature, when in fact each sculpture is composed of hundreds of small pieces of wood that are meticulously crafted together.

My work can be called the ultimate recycling: taking the detritus of nature and giving it a new life. My influences are many; from looking at microscopic nature and plant life on this Earth to researching the heavenly bodies in the images beamed back from the Hubble Telescope. From studying ancient Buddhist mandalas and designs to delving deeper into quantum physics. From being inspired by the illustrations in the 15th century Voynich Manuscript to the black and white photographs from the photographer, Karl Blossfeldt, these influences are all an inspiration to me. I am interested in conveying with my work, the wonder and mysteries that are swirling and surrounding us daily.

Loren Eiferman was born in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the Tri-State region including gallery and museum exhibitions in NYC, the Hudson Valley and Connecticut. Her artwork is included in numerous corporate and private art collections. In 2014 she was awarded a NYC MTA Arts & Design art commission to produce steel railings for a Metro North train station. She currently maintains a studio in the Hudson Valley and can be found on Instagram at @loreneiferman.

Elise Siegel

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

My artwork has taken various forms over the course of my career. It has at times been more abstract or more representational, and I have employed a range of materials and processes. But my constant underlying motivation has been the desire to give concrete form to fragmentary bits of consciousness: moments of inner conflict, disquiet, ambivalence and unease; and in doing this, create work that generates a psychological tension with the viewer.

Since 2010, I have been creating ceramic portrait busts that explore the abstract edges of figurative representation. Although each of my sculptures is a distinct individual, none are portraits of specific people. Rather, my sculptures are meant to embody familiar psychic states while remaining open-ended, allowing viewers to bring a wide range of projections to the encounter. The challenge for me is to imbue each piece with the immediacy of human experience, and through the process of making, allow each sculpture to project a sense of its hidden life—to create an object that comes to life while remaining a thing.

My visual inspiration comes from a wide range of sources. I’m most drawn to figurative sculptures and sculptural objects that appear to have had some other cultural function, either in ritual or in daily life, in addition to being creative expressions. These are objects that humans have empowered: idols, reliquaries, masks and even toys. I’ve taken formal cues from the abstracted features and exaggerated forms of the Jomon Dogu figures of Neolithic Japan, as well as the hollow eyes of the Haniwah funeral figures from the third to sixth century A.D. For me, these sculptural objects—everything from Renaissance reliquary busts to medieval European iron helmets and masks from many cultures–continue to resonate as their meanings evolve over time.

The meaning of what I do is very much embedded in process—in all the ways I connect to my material. As much as possible, I want everything I perceive and feel and do in this process to be revealed in the resulting object. From early childhood and for most of my art career I have made things out of clay. No other material rivals clay’s immediacy, its capacity to register and record touch, and its ability to capture the experience of making.

I think of what I do as a kind of intimate interaction with the clay: a conversation, a dance, an exploration, or a wrestling match. Mainly, it’s an engagement in the unpredictable present moment, rather than an attempt at control. Hopefully, the resulting sculptures are embodiments of this experience.

My work has led me to think deeply about the transformative nature of our relationships with objects. Objects change us. We connect with them. We animate them, use them, learn from them, and empower them with all kinds of meaning and at times, even agency. This is the realm of the uncanny and the religious ritual. For me it is also the realm of art.

Elise Siegel (born 1952) is an American sculptor and installation artist based in New York. Raised in New Jersey, Siegel attended the University of Chicago, where she was introduced to ceramic sculpture by Ruth Duckworth. From there, Siegel transferred to the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr College of Art and Design) to continue with ceramics and sculpture in earnest. Siegel moved to New York in 1982.

Major exhibitions: Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, NY; Studio10; NY, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Nancy Margolis Gallery, NY; Third World Ceramics Biennial, Seoul, Korea; Garth Clark Project Space, NY; Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan Univ., CT, Jane Hartsook Gallery, NY; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS; and Halsey Gallery, College of Charleston, SC; Laurie Rubin Gallery, NY. Fellowships: Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and 3 NYFA Fellowships. Other awards: Virginia A. Groot Foundation grant and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Public Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Chazen Museum, Madison, WI; and Arario Gallery, Seoul, Korea.

Nancy Davidson

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

In this new series of drawings I explore the complex interplay between form and formlessness, a thematic continuation of my ongoing inflatable sculpture series. Just as my sculptures defy traditional boundaries with their dynamic, mutable shapes, these drawings delve into the fluid and often absurd nature of the human body, echoing the same sense of elastic transformation. The drawings are inspired by the concept of bodily inflation and deflation, capturing moments of both expansion and contraction that resonate with the physicality of my sculptural work. Each piece reflects a tension between rigidity and flexibility, much like the inflatable forms that swell and deflate in unpredictable rhythms.

A quote from Samuel Beckett, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” serves as a metaphor for the ceaseless cycle of growth and decay inherent in the human experience. Beckett’s depiction of the protagonist Winnie, ensnared in the absurdity of her predicament, parallels the existential themes of my art. The drawings, like Winnie’s struggle, embody the fleshly absurdities and ephemeral pleasures of existence, inviting viewers to confront the paradoxes of their own physicality.

Through these drawings, I seek to evoke a sense of both vulnerability and resilience, mirroring the tensions found in my inflatable sculptures. Together, they form a dialogue on the human condition—one that oscillates between the tangible and the intangible, the controlled and the uncontrollable.

Nancy Davidson is a contemporary artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, installation, and
photography and drawing. She focuses on exploring the female form, power dynamics, and societal expectations. Her innovative use of materials, such as inflatable latex sculptures, challenges traditional representations of femininity, blending humor with reflections on power and gender.

Davidson has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at prestigious galleries and institutions, including the ICA Philadelphia, Locust Projects Miami, and the Robert Miller Gallery. Davidson's contributions to contemporary art have been recognized with various awards and fellowships, such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Creative Capital Grant, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award.

Nancy Bowen

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

My work ranges from mixed media sculpture to collage to public art to literary collaboration. The common thread underlying it all is the collision of representation and abstraction which results in objects that exist in an in-between zone of form and idea. I present familiar forms and materials in unfamiliar juxtapositions to create an uneasy fusion of information and experience. My process has always been extremely inclusive; both in my approach to materials and in the imagery I source. I am as inspired by historical decorative arts and craft traditions as I am by Brancusi or Eva Hesse.

The group of sculptures shown here are made of a variety of materials including clay, glass, steel, wax, resin and other non-traditional mixed media. Often, I begin with a fragment of the female body which is complicated by the material aspects of the sculpture. My use of tactile materials combined with organic form accentuates the visceral sensuality of the work. I don’t know where I am headed when I start these pieces – I like to surprise myself by venturing into the unknown. Unconscious associations sometimes dictate forms or materials. The resulting sculptures become a site for projection, a mysterious addition to our rapidly changing material world.

Nancy Bowen has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including at the Lesley Heller Gallery in NYC, Annina Nosei Gallery in NYC, Galerie Farideh Cadot in Paris, the Betsy Rosenfield gallery in Chicago, and the James Gallery in Houston. She has been included in group shows in various museums such as the Museum of Art and Design, the Neuberger Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, and the Institut Franco- Americain in Rennes, among many others.

Bowen has won awards from Anonymous was a Woman, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Jentel Foundation, the Brown Foundation Fellowship at Dora Maar House, and the European Ceramic Work Center, among others.

Recently Bowen published her first book, in collaboration with the poet Elizabeth Willis: Spectral Evidence: the Witch Book (Litmus Press).

Bowen received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Hunter College (CUNY). She has taught at Bard College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Columbia University. She is a Professor Emerita of Sculpture at Purchase College, S.U.N.Y. She maintains a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

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