Buster Levi Gallery is pleased to present Making New by Pat Hickman at 121 Main Street in Cold Spring, New York. The exhibition will run from September 6  to September 28, 2025. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Saturday September 6 from 4-6 pm.

There are two threads that exist in Pat Hickman’s body of work that are present in this exhibition: common objects and memory. In Hickman’s last show at Buster Levi, Legacy in September 2023, the common objects were tools and an apron. The memory was the similarity between an artist residency located at a farm in Kansas reminiscent of her experience growing up on the Plains of Colorado. The common object in this show is a railroad spike and the memories she has of railroad spikes and their use. Hickman found a stash of discarded spikes which she rescued. As with any object she works with, they are transformed by her process—casting soft animal membranes over them and in this case, creating ghost spikes. Repetition is a foundational principal in a majority of Hickman’s works. She states “Repetition brings shape and meaning, evoking time and memory.” Her works may engage with specific history, as is the case with Dragon Spike, which honors “the Chinese laborers who made up two thirds of the work force on the Transcontinental Railroad.” More often, Hickman creates pieces that are free of definite historic references hoping to; “summon the spirit that lives within the spike and its ghost.” The goal, for Hickman, is that viewers will bring their own experiences with railroads and as she puts it “remember the importance of this simple, usually ignored, mundane object, the spike.” 

This exhibition, as all of Pat Hickman’s work, creates a dialogue between objects, materials and the potential associations and ideas that their combination generates. Though grounded in reality, the work is both intellectually engaging and transcendent.

The gallery will be open Saturday and Sunday from noon to five pm.

For more information: busterlevigallery.com

Artist Website: Pat Hickman