March 14 - April 26, 2026
Opening Receptions:
Saturday, 14th
5 - 7pm
BILL HOCHHAUSEN
NOT OUT OF THE WOODS YET
GARNER Art Center is excited to announce a major solo exhibition of the works of Bill Hochausen in the Main Gallery of Building 35. Paintings and sculptures from Hochhausen’s impressive career will be on exhibit in a collaborative tour de force with installations by Lisa Karrer in the Ned Harris Gallery.
Galen Johnson wrote in his 2010 essay, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, “Nothing can be more satisfying than the materials and the tools, to experience that physicality as the materials open up to become images. For Bill, it’s always been trees and to be among trees, to repeat a forest, and now giving the first lives of trees a second life as art.”
Artist Statement
The dramatic Hudson River landscape moved and inspired me when I became a resident here, fifty years ago. Historically, since the early 1930's the region has seen vibrant participation in culture, and it has sustained a mixed community that encouraged musicians and visual artists. I was fortunate enough, in 1989, to win a NYSCA grant, it supported a permanent installation of views of 'Haverstraw Bay' I painted for a year. Out of thirteen, a selection of six panels, joined as one composition called "The Six Seasons", was installed at the Haverstraw Post Office. My daughter Laila cut the ribbon.
Many opportunities to teach and lecture, sustained summer tours, and painting, all over the country, have informed my work. But trees and the hills, the river, the topography we call landscape, were always there. Light changes shape even as it illuminates; it accumulates as a topography of light, seen as color on the canvas. Passing clouds shade colors to a lower register, instantly, the Cadmium red is thrown off balance (you wonder, what is “realist” painting?) A wind gust spills the turpentine.
More beautiful, straightforward aspects of nature are also 'subjects' of my interest. You might call it the outside game, the 'what'. The “why” is the inside game that celebrates ideas, artifice, visual deception (illusion?) What fun!
The work selected for this exhibit represents the basis of my endeavor, a response to both nature and my evolution (mutation?) as a thinking artist. Dylan Thomas said, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age...". Alas, our age finds the bucolic fenced, degraded in the accumulating pollution of our mutual environment. In the light of burning forests, all species of beings are endangered.
Lisa Karrer originally conceived of this exhibit. Her immersive installation, called FOREST FOR THE TREES, is in the Ned Harris Gallery. My exhibit, titled NOT OUT OF THE WOODS YET, is in the main gallery of Building 35. Our two exhibits meet in the middle corridor with a series of my plein-air landscapes to make the transition between exhibits. Our affinity to trees connects the natural to the metaphor, and, as vision itself, metaphor connects to the social.
LISA KARRER
FOREST FOR THE TREES
FOREST FOR THE TREES, Lisa Karrer
FOREST FOR THE TREES is a community-based installation created by interdisciplinary artist Lisa Karrer. This immersive exhibit was developed specifically for Garner Arts Center’s Ned Harris Gallery. Karrer’s installation features a moving forest of ceramic trees, dreamlike wall projections, compelling audio narratives, and green screen video scenarios featuring over 45 Rockland County residents and participants from around the globe. Artist Bill Hochhausen’s plein air paintings of iconic Rockland landscapes will be installed in the Harris gallery passageway, leading viewers into the exhibit.
Entering the space, viewers see a miniature “forest” of Karrer’s hand-painted ceramic trees revolving in slow motion on a motorized platen, fabricated by kinetic artist Gregory Barsamian. The moving tree forms also appear as large-scale projections on the gallery walls in meditative, ever-changing perspectives.
An audio soundtrack presents a sequence of personal narratives, a chronicle of real stories about trees contributed by participants from Rockland Community and around the world. These intimate narratives are underpinned by composer/instrumentalist David Simons’ wood percussion score “Songs of the Trees”, Karrer’s vocal renderings from the Great American Songbook, and selected field recordings.
A large wall monitor displays green screen video scenarios shot and edited by Karrer, featuring the ceramic trees in real environments that also explore magical realism and timeless myths. Human figures appear in each scene, playing, picnicking, dancing, drawing, cycling, climbing trees, and perched in branches.
FOREST FOR THE TREES explores humankind’s intimate relationship with trees, and the critical roles they play in sustaining our planet. Trees provide and maintain habitats for essential species, manufacture soil by partnering with bacteria, enable critical transmission of groundwater via rock beds and local aquifers, and subsume toxins and metals from the environment. Factors such as clear-cutting and unchecked development, climate disruption, infestation, and infectious disease continue to threaten this crucial eco-balance.
Karrer’s installation illustrates this critical relationship through the artist’s lens, presenting viewers with multiple aesthetic perspectives and real stories of neighbors from our Rockland community and beyond.
FOREST FOR THE TREES also seeks to foster proactive environmental awareness and practices on a local scale. This multi-arts installation will include an artist talk, a scheduled gallery panel discussion with local tree conservators and environmentalists, and a contemporary music concert featuring Lisa Karrer and David Simons. Dates TBA.
The artist wishes to thank Rockland Center for the Arts/RoCA for ceramic scholarship support, Garner Arts Center/Dye Works for hosting the green screen project residency, ACOR’s Art4All award, all project participants, and the many generous people who contributed to FOREST’s… GoFundMe development campaign.
This project is supported by the Arts Council of Rockland.
