FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Of Time and Tides

Marta Chaffee

Katia Read

Opening Reception: Friday, August 8, 5-7pm

Exhibition: August 8 - September 14, 2025 

MARQUEE PROJECTS is thrilled to announce a two-person exhibition featuring drawings by Marta Chaffee and sculptures by Katia Read. An opening reception will be held on Friday, August 8, from 5-7pm.

Of Time and Tides brings us the privilege of contemplating the work of two artists whose practices have developed over many decades and centered on the natural world. Both artists live on the coasts of this country – one on the east and one on the west. And both have created mature, quiet, and compelling bodies of work that consider the importance of their immediate environments, one focused primarily on the land, the other on the water.

For more than six decades, Marta Chaffee has concentrated on landscape drawings and paintings of the shoreline and grasses of her native Southern California. Inspired by multiple trips to Brookhaven Hamlet, her newest works depict the marshlands surrounding Squassux Landing and the Fireplace Historic District. Her panoramic vistas of the horizon, rendered in meticulously etched soft pencil marks, are as closely observed as they are hypnotic, suggesting meditative reflections on time, light, and change. These recent drawings were among the few possessions she took when her home was threatened by the recent Palisades fire. Everything survived, fortunately, and now the pieces represent both the resilience of the grasses they depict and the determination to carry on with our lives.

Katia Read’s attention has consistently been captivated by the Great South Bay of Long Island, and her many years of activism in local oyster and ecosystem restoration inform her art practice as a similar metaphor for resilience and renewal. Her most recent sculptures explore and attempt to interpret elements found in the bay, and broaden her focus to contemplate the earth’s fragile layers – the crust, the core, and the mantle that lie beneath both land and sea. Various stoneware and earthenware clays are fired without glaze, revealing the materials’ natural properties, sometimes finished with beeswax. The resulting objects subtly evoke sedimentation, sea levels rising above the land, and even totems or headstones: these are eloquent, lyrical, elegiac signals of warning.

"This exhibition is a poetic dialogue between two bodies of work that feel destined to be shown together,” said András Szántó, an arts writer and Brookhaven Hamlet resident who suggested the collaboration to the gallery last year. "Katia and Marta’s works—though motivated by different interests and experiences and embodied in diverse mediums—speak in a similar register. Both artists are preoccupied by the landscape, which they engage in a spirit of celebration tinged with concern about the state of our natural environment. The land and the ocean are never far off in these drawings and sculptures, but both artists are firmly anchored in abstraction, distilling what they see into elemental shapes and striations, taking delight not only in sharing what they see in the world but in refining a visual language uniquely their own. Finally, both artists are averse to loud statements, bright colors, and trite messages, choosing instead to put forward works that win you over quietly, yet convincingly. This kind of artistic resolve takes decades to mature, and we are fortunate to witness the conversation unfold right here in Bellport."