Ellenville’s art axis on Market Street now has an intriguing companion on the fourth floor of 2 Elting Court, the Village Government center. A trio of artist-adventurers have moved in and are working up a very interesting project involving the Rondout Creek.

On Sunday, August 3, two of the artists opened up the aptly-named 4^th Floor Studios to greet the public.

Say hello to Gretchen Burger, artist, filmmaker, who makes documentaries, video art installations, and now “community engagement activations and public-commons interventions in the digital ether.”

Gretchen has produced, directed and edited award-winning public television and feature documentaries and has taught traditional, experimental and immersive media and storytelling to students of all ages in the Seattle area. She is a co-founder of the Seattle Documentary Association.

The other artist present was Sarah Cameron Sunde, who’s described as an “interdisciplinary environmental artist and director working at the intersection of performance, video and public art.”

Sunde has a Guggenheim Fellowship that she’s using to complete a series of nine performance and video artworks to be made on six of Earth’s seven continents. Her work has been shown at several paragraphs’ worth of galleries and art centers in at least ten countries.

She comes fully alive when talking about water. Most recently she kayaked from Atlanta to the sea, a 450-mile trip, while documenting the journey and celebrating the river and then the estuary.

At the introductory event on Sunday, Sunde displayed a map of the Rondout Creek and its tributaries. The Rondout, she explained, is a central organizing feature of our landscape here, guided by the Catskill Mountains and the Shawangunk Ridge to flow north into Esopus and the Hudson River.

“Water is really the thing that connects all of us,” she said. And from that comes the mission of the studio – finding ways to reconnect the people to the creek.

“The first overall thing is to connect people to the water in their own watershed where we all live,” Sunde said. From that connection, she added, “We can connect people with one another, the water is really the thing that connects us.”

“This is also a reminder,” Gretchen Burger said, “that this studio is the next in a series that began on Main Street in Kerhonkson. We’ve moved upstream to Ellenville.”

Moving with the flow of the Rondout is the theme of this project.

“We’re looking at the mixture of people,” Burger said. “Who belongs here and why. What are the connections between long-timers and newcomers.”

Burger acknowledges that the long history of European settlement in Ulster County includes some “dark histories,” like the wars fought in the 1660s that broke the Lenape people, and the bloody Seven Years War. “Our goal as artists is to ask questions.”

“We are interested in bringing some of these questions to the surface because they can be profound and so can the answers,” Sunde said. “We acknowledge that we’re all here together and ask ‘What can we do with that?’”

4^th Floor Studio is now working with the Rondout Watershed Alliance on a fuller understanding of all the water flows in Ulster County, to determine the access to that water.

The project is ongoing and there will be updates to follow, but Sunde, fresh from a kayak trip from Atlanta to the sea, is thinking about paddling into the Rondout.

“We are definitely going to launch some boats,” she said, “and explore the water.”