Hauswald by Erica Hauser 

The local artist’s iconic colorful wooden shapes combine into landscapes of visual poetry. 

Exhibition Dates: May 31 - June 29, 2025 

Opening Reception: Saturday, 31 May, 6-8pm

Location: ArtYard Kingston - 80 Smith Avenue, Kingston, NY 12401

ArtPort Kingston is thrilled to announce Hauswald, a solo exhibition by local artist Erica Hauser presented in the 24/7 Gallery. 

Each of the 12 artworks in the micro-exhibition feature the cut wooden shapes endemic to Hauser’s practice. Through repetition, color, and artful layering or stacking, Hauser transforms these simple building blocks into minimalist landscapes with grand effect.  Stacks of color become abstractions of a flower or landscape, or the dense thickets of green give the sense of confronting wild greenery in the interior of a field or forest. 

Each of the featured artworks wears a title derived from a single line of Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself,” in which the poet’s understanding of selfhood blends with his observation of natural fact. “Observing a spear of summer grass,” for instance, with their sharp wood spears softly writhing and tangling. He wrote, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,” and, as such, Hauswald also contemplates this unified field of being: the fact of our common origin with the landscapes we encounter around us. 

See the exhibition from May 31 - June 29; visitors are invited to encounter the exhibition at any time of the day or night as part of ArtPort Kingston’s public 24/7 Gallery. A windowed foyer in the heart of Kingston transformed into a continuous platform for public exhibitions, ArtPort Kingston’s 24/7 Gallery offers a portal into a world of contemporary art, where local, national, and international artists are given space to experiment with an unconventional format. 

Musical Chairs 

An Installation by Felix Olivieri & Stefan Saffer 

March 8 - May 15, 2025

“Chairs are about status, power and control. That’s why we like them.” 

– Colin McSwiggen, Academia Sinica

A collaborative exhibition from Kingston-based artists Felix Olivieri and Stefan Saffer, “Musical Chairs” is presented as the inaugural exhibition of ArtPort Kingston’s new 24/7 Gallery, which offers around-the-clock public access to rotating exhibitions via the Kingston art-center’s windowed foyer. 

“Musical Chairs” presents a spectacle of sculpture, light, sound, and movement. Empty chairs are floating in the gallery box, hanging from the ceiling and colliding with each other. The golden surface of the chairs reflects light through a thick fog which occasionally fills the space, disappearing and abstracting the installation. 

The installation’s three chairs represent, simultaneously, three different functions, positions, and social groups. From the chair’s perspective, any person taking a seat is represented by their buttocks, and all people are the same: the chair has no bias by which it ensures the support of its seat. Nevertheless, we have assigned, over centuries, different chair designs to different functions, ranks, and uses, starting with the throne. In his essay, “Against Chairs,” academic Colin McSwiggen writes “Not only are Chairs a health hazard, but they also have a problematic history that has inextricably tied them to our culture of status-obassed individualism.”

With “Musical Chairs,” the artists’ attempt to create a democratic view of the chairs based on their simple function stands (or hangs) in contrast to the hierarchical categorization by their users. The installation reflects this ongoing struggle for equality and power, while attempting to catalyze the impulse to rethink who we are by what chair we sit on–literally and figuratively–and who we want to sit at our table and why. 

The exhibition will open with a free, public reception, coinciding with the launch of ArtPort Kingston’s Flag Pole Project, on March 8, 3-5pm at ArtYard Kingston - 80 Smith Avenue, Kingston NY 12401. Artists will be present and light refreshments will be provided. All are welcome!