WOMENS WORK : ALLISON DEBRITZ, HEATHER GUERTIN, AND SONIA RUSCOE

Opening Reception July 19th, 4-6pm

Germantown Laundromat
3 Church Avenue, Germantown NY

On view July 17th - 20th, 12 - 5pm
Curated by : Katherine March Driscoll, Gigi Gatewood, and Jordanna Kalman

Germantown will be popping with wonderful openings that night as part of Upstate Art Weekend. Be sure to swing by our neighbors : @marymacgillstudio @motherinlawhaus @gatherwildranch @skyhighfarmhudsonvalley

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Artists : @allisondebritz / @heather__guertin / @soniaruscoe
Curators : @kathydisco / @gigigatewood / @rabbitsparrow

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WOMENS WORK : ALLISON DEBRITZ, HEATHER GUERTIN, AND SONIA RUSCOE

July 17 - 20th, 2025

Here is the second iteration of WOMENS WORK. A tradition borrowed from Artists Space, the three artists from last year's exhibition have selected three women artists to exhibit together in the Germantown Laundromat. If this exhibition format were to continue every year for 100 years we would have 300 women. You could do a lot of things with 300 organized women. This large network would resemble a family tree with branches growing and extending over time. Three hundred women, linked by their connection to the initial group of three, might share some common themes.

WOMENS WORK situates itself in a laundromat—a site of public gathering and private self-reflection, but also one of traditionally gendered labor. From the (mostly male…) Impressionists’ impersonal portrayals of working women in the landscape to Simone Leigh’s monumental 2022 sculpture Last Garment, the title considers the washerwoman as both a historical and artistic figure: a symbol of endurance, communal care, and inner life. The artists in this show are energized by the potential for connection and the expansion of ideas that can arise when arbitrary networks form around a shared goal—like an art exhibition. Together, their works reframe women’s labor not as a burden, but as a powerful site of resilience, creativity, and collective possibility.

The three women exhibiting this year are Allison DeBritz, Heather Guertin, and Sonia Ruscoe, artists who construct their worlds through fragmentation. Parts of the self, bodies, images and materials are combined to make a whole. These parts, both external and internal, are connected through a myriad of interactions; through collage, all over patterns, swoops of bright color or sharp contrasts.

The artworks in this exhibition appear to be in constant motion. Painterly lines that drift across the canvas and bold brushstrokes hold together the collapsing figures in Sonia Ruscoe’s two paintings. Ruscoe’s work often involves fast-paced gestures paired with slower mark-making that meditate on how feminine societal expectations and personal relationships shape the embodiment of identities. Similarly, in the two new paintings created by Heather Guertin, painterly gestures tie fragmented source imagery together into new and imaginative compositions. Guertin’s use of patterns delineate different aspects of her collages as they unite the painting through a psychologically charged and textured surface. Allison DeBritz’s black and white photographic work uses strong contrast and repetition to intertwine bodies and forms creating waves moving in space. For this exhibition she has created a large-scale hanging vinyl photograph and life-sized collage that lean against the walls, each with a dynamic energy inspired by the life and work of Lee Miller that uncovers how women’s creative labor is often co-opted by male narratives and addresses larger themes of desire and erasure.

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Allison DeBritz is an artist and educator with an MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University and a BFA in Photography from SUNY New Paltz. DeBritz’s work intimately considers the gendered paradigms of domestic spaces and relationships through an interdisciplinary feminist lens. She utilizes photography, collage, video, and installation as part of a ritualistic process, engaging with the psychological narratives woven throughout her work. She has shown her work throughout the U.S. and internationally with recent exhibitions at ChaNorth, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Baxter Street Camera Club, and PH21 Gallery (Budapest, Hungry), and solo exhibitions at Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts (Nizhny Tagil, Russia) and Space Place Gallery (Nizhny Tagil, Russia). DeBritz currently lives in Troy, NY, and teaches college photography.

Heather Guertin received her Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her practice embraces abstraction as a method to explore and understand form. Through subjective translation from image to paint, Guertin’s works balance illusionistic spatial depth with the flatness of vibrant color fields. Guertin has recently exhibited at JDJ, New York, The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI, Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Galería Agustina Ferreyra, Mexico City, Broadway Gallery, New York, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Brennan & Griffin, New York, Flag Art Foundation, New York and Bortolami, New York. Guertin has performed at White Columns, New York and the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, PA. Her work was recently acquired by the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection. Guertin’s novella with Social Malpractice and Publication Studio was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, and a monograph of her work was published by Hassla Books in 2015.

Sonia Ruscoe is a painter and poet from and based in New York City and the Hudson Valley. She holds a BA from CUNY Brooklyn College and is an incoming MFA student at Mica’s Hoffberger school of painting. Her paintings have been shown at SEPTEMBER Gallery, Basilica Hudson, Baba Yaga, Better Read Than Dead, Lucas Lucas, and most recently a solo show at Nonchalant Gallery (all in NYC/HudsonValley). Elsewhere she has shown at Casa Lu, CDMX, 4WS space (LA), and in Richmond (VA) her works on paper were part of a performance where they were thrown into a hole and burned. Sonia is also a writer and her first chapbook of poetry was self printed on Risograph in winter of 2025 at Shandaken Print Residency.