ricHard barlow
lisa craft
ellen driscoll

Catskill Art Space (CAS) is pleased to announce the opening of three new exhibitions by Richard Barlow, Lisa Craft and Ellen Driscoll. The exhibitions open on Saturday, January 17, 2026, with an artist talk from 3–4 p.m. and a reception from 4–5 p.m. They will remain on view through February 28, 2026. This exhibition brings together three artists whose practices engage the natural world through materially distinct yet conceptually aligned approaches, foregrounding environmental fragility, memory, and responsibility in a moment of ecological precarity.

Richard Barlow will present a large-scale, temporary, site-specific drawing made with chalk on blackboard-painted gallery walls. Rooted in careful observation of the natural world, Barlow’s drawings evoke landscapes that are at once intimate and monumental. The works are deliberately ephemeral: erased at the close of the exhibition, they exist only briefly, vulnerable to time and even to the physical presence of viewers, whose touch or movement may alter or destroy the image. This fragility underscores the work’s environmental and existential concerns, mapping loss, impermanence, and memory onto acts of looking and inhabiting space.

Lisa Craft’s Drive-In Movie for Leaf Litter is an immersive animated installation that draws viewers into the fecund, mysterious world of the forest floor. Combining rear-projected silhouette animation with a revolving sculptural form, the work unfolds as a miniature theater infused with a richly layered soundscape. Positioned at ground level, audiences encounter cycling leaf litter whose shadows cast a hypnotic spell, punctuated by disruptions, disappearances, and shifting winds. Craft’s process begins with observational walks through urban and rural green spaces, filming birds, insects, plants, and fungi encountered along the way. These beings are digitally extracted, manipulated through drawing, painting, sculpture, and animation, and set within time-lapse gardens and animated environments. The soundscape deepens immersion, animating both seen and unseen elements of the leaf-litter world. Craft’s use of silhouettes traces back to the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, when prolonged darkness transformed everyday objects into animated shadows within flashlight beams.

Ellen Driscoll’s work encompasses drawing, sculpture, and public art, united by a sustained engagement with environmental and social justice. Her drawings, made with walnut ink—a material known for its capacity to remediate environmental toxins—depict plants as both subject and agent, embedding ecological process within representation itself. Her sculptures, fabricated from waste HDPE plastic, transform discarded material into forms that evoke the floods, droughts, and systemic imbalances driven by climate change. Through research-driven practice and close attention to visual detail, Driscoll’s work asks viewers to recognize their own responsibility within these unfolding environmental narratives.

About the Artists

Richard Barlow received his MFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of Minnesota and his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a two-time recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Drawing and has received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, among other honors. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at the Bellevue Arts Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, Fenimore Art Museum, and Landskrona Foto.

Lisa Craft is a multidisciplinary animator and moving-image artist whose work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives, Tate Modern, Tokyo’s Image Forum, Tribeca Film Festival, Slamdance, and Imagine Science, and is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and has received support from the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and MacDowell. Craft holds multiple Daytime Emmy Awards for her work on Sesame Street and is Professor Emerita in the Film/Video Department at Pratt Institute.

Ellen Driscoll works across sculpture, drawing, and public art. Her recent public commission, Site Woven (2022), was created for the Charles R. Jonas Federal Courthouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. Recent exhibitions include ReRooted (2024), a solo exhibition at the Berkshire Botanical Garden, and Plasticulture at the School of Visual Arts Gallery, New York. Driscoll has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Bunting Institute at Harvard University, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Anonymous Was a Woman. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.