The Arts Center at Duck Creek in Springs will open its final summer exhibitions on Saturday with "Sue McNally: Mining the Middle," and ceramics by Ted Tyler.
Ms. McNally, whose large-scale paintings and collage studies can be seen in the barn, has been studying landscape for over 30 years. She once spent 12 months painting en plein air across all 50 states, but has recently focused more on process than depiction, creating fragments, or amalgams, of places, informed by memory.
She now thinks of landscape as the "substructure" of her abstraction, according to the center, and has spoken of the satisfaction of finding her way through a problem -- determining, for example, which elements of the landscape get to inhabit the abstraction, and which aspects of abstraction better depict its vitality. Her collage studies illuminate those efforts.
A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. Ms. McNally will speak about her work on Sunday afternoon at 3.
Mr. Tyler studied ceramics during the 1970s at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the San Francisco Art Institute. After running a successful textile business for 30 years, he returned to ceramics in 2005, eventually building a studio and shed-sized kiln on his East Hampton property.
He works from wood and gas-firing, in combination with various ash, slip, and glaze applications. While the works in the exhibition, which will be in the site's smaller gallery building, also incorporate such materials as copper, wax, and stone, they are influenced as well by sources outside of ceramics.
Those include Giorgio Morandi's still-life paintings of vessels, stripped down to their basic forms. In addition, the cartoonish forms in Mr. Tyler's "Circus" series suggest Philip Guston's figurative work.
A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday from 3 to 5 p.m.
Both shows will continue through Oct. 8.
