Hot on the heels of this summer's art events comes yet another. From October 6-9, an art event called "That We Do This Together," organized by artist and curator Greg Mackavoy will take place in The Red Barn, on the corner of Ulster Hill Heights and Canal Street. Pine Bush's Mackavoy has brought about forty-one artists from all over the area who work in all manner of media to Ellenville for this event.

"A woman named Iraena Elbaum invited me to take a look at a barn she owned in Ellenville," says Mackavoy of the show's origins. "She asked me if I would be interested in having an art show there. She'd been following my work for five or six years. I went up there with about twelve of my friends from the city who I've been showing with, and we went and saw the space and we fell in love with it." Part of why this show came about, says Mackavoy, is because while he was growing up, he found it tough to find events like this in the Hudson Valley, and he wants to provide the kind of event he wanted to see back then. "You really had to have your ear on the ground to find where the stuff was happening, where the music, where the poetry, where the culture was, where the art was, where the artists were hanging out�where it was happening. And it's a really great opportunity to go be able to go up there now with a lot of the people who I used to run with as a young person looking for these things, and be able to create this kind of thing that we would have sought after so badly."

Mackavoy describes the various different disciplines represented at the show: "We have anything you can think of. There's going to be video art, and film poetry, spoken word performance, music, painting, printmaking, sound design, installation pieces� We're trying to get as many people exposed to as many different perspectives as possible. The only specific theme for the show is that all the work was to be created in the three months that we knew about it. Now there are some exceptions to that rule, but the great majority has been working on pieces specific for this for the past three months."

Mackavoy earned his bachelor's from Purchase in 2001, and has since been showing his art with many of the people he's working with for this event. "I was primarily a painter and a printmaker all through school," he says. "For the past few years and for this show I'm making these things I'm calling 'cement paintings.' They're much more sculptural than anything I've worked on recently." As for the true nature of the cement paintings, Mackavoy is coyly cryptic, and explains that if people want to know, they should come down and see for themselves.

More information about the event can be found online at thatwedothistogether.info.

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