Leather & Plastic
Hugo Montoya, Rolling in The Grave, 2025, Antique carriage, plexi.
Em Rooney, Twin Portrait, 2025, Antique reins, acrylic, polymer, resin, and mica.
June 29th through August 28th, 2025
Leather and Plastics explores the trajectory of industrialization in the Catskills—from its 19th-century origins in leather production to today’s global economy dominated by synthetic materials—and reflects on how shifts in materials and labor practices have reshaped commerce and daily life.
During the 1830s, the Catskills were a hub of industrial activity, with tanneries proliferating across the region to meet a large demand for leather goods. These goods, once handcrafted, were increasingly made in factories, marking a pivotal moment in the rise of mass production, factory labor, and global supply chains. This exhibition draws a line from that moment of industrial transformation to our present, where plastic has come to replace many traditional materials and where labor and production remain globalized and fragmented.
The exhibition features work by six contemporary artists: Em Rooney, Hugo Montoya, Amanda Pohan, Linnea Gad, Tony Bluestone, and Catherine Telford-Keogh. Each artist engages the themes of materiality, labor, and production through a range of practices, offering viewers a meditation on what it means to make—and consume—in a post-industrial world.
A centerpiece of the exhibition is a 19th-century carriage, transformed by Hugo Montoya with plastic car decals—a gesture that connects early transportation infrastructure with modern branding and consumer culture. Amanda Pohan evokes the intersection of cars, leather, and memory through a synthetic “new car smell” that slowly infuses the space, offering an olfactory reminder of how industrial materials shape perception and desire.
Em Rooney, Linnea Gad, and Catherine Telford-Keogh contribute more intimate works that investigate the physical and symbolic residue of production, combining historic and contemporary methods to draw attention to how materials encode labor histories.
Aptly staged in our newly renovated Carriage House, the exhibition explores how the movement—of materials, of labor, of products—has always been central to commerce. Leather and Plastic invites visitors to reflect on the layered history of industry in the Catskills and consider how the legacies of production continue to shape economic, environmental, and aesthetic realities today.
– Tony Bluestone, Curator
Historic Objects
Saddle Wall, objects clockwise from top: Feedbag; whip, fly swatter, saddle bench, horse collar. All courtesy The Zadock Pratt Museum collection.
Saddle Wall
Over the course of his lifetime, Pratt owned approximately 2,000 horses—an essential resource for transporting materials through the mountainous terrain. Horses played a crucial role in the expanding industrial economy, facilitating the movement of goods to and from remote areas.
Transportation was central to the rise of American industry. In the early 19th century, Zadock Pratt established a tannery deep in the Catskill Mountains, strategically located for access to water and the bark of local trees used in tanning leather. Hides traveled a long route—from Argentina, through New York City, up the Hudson River to Catskill, and finally overland to Prattsville—before being processed and returned to the city for sale. Industrial success depended not just on resources, but on the ability to move them.
All of these leather devices were a means to work with the horses, which acted as the engines for so much of the labor of the time. With the presence of hides and human labor to work those hides into functional forces, we can more easily feel the connection between the cost of this type of work and the difficult relationship with animals, death, and the environment.
Cobbler’s Wall
Pratt’s tannery produced leather that was almost exclusively used to make the soles of shoes. This section of the room has pulled a variety of objects from our collection that utilize leather in ways related to footwear and transportation.
From the durable soles and leather strapping of the ice skates and saddle stirrups to the more finely worked leather uppers of the children’s shoes. Interestingly, shoe manufacturing is one area where leather is still considered a valuable and preferable material today
Cobbler’s Wall, objects clockwise from top: leather soles; ice skates; cobbler’s bench; stirrups; boots owned by Zadock Pratt; children’s boots. All courtesy The Zadock Pratt Museum collection.
Tool Wall, objects clockwise from top left: powder horns with leather strapping; binoculars; hog scraper; shot pouch; cobblers pliers; ax; shoe molds; wheat chaff. All courtesy The Zadock Pratt Museum collection.
Tool Wall
This display invites reflection on the relationship between leather, death, and decay—reminding us what it means to exert human will over material reality. The tools mounted here come from two connected worlds: the leather tanning industry and tools bound together with leather strapping. In both, we see how animal remains were embedded in the everyday, making leather a constant, utilitarian presence in human life.
The physical labor of tanning—felling trees, scraping hides—reflects a kind of intimacy with the natural world that modern materials like plastic tend to obscure. Here, you’ll find an axe once used to cut down hemlock trees, whose bark was essential for tanning, and the very reason Pratt came to this region. The hog scraper on display was used to remove hair from animal hides, another visceral step in the tanning process.
Together, these tools represent a time when the boundaries between human labor, animal life, and the environment were not so easily separated. As Glen Adamson puts it, “Leather thus occupies a liminal condition, as if it were a membrane between life and death itself. This is perhaps why it is usually lined, or worn as an outer garment, rather than touching our own flesh; maybe we don’t want that strange power right up against us.”
Daguerreotype Wall
The group of daguerreotypes on display here are housed in protective cases made of vulcanite, a chemically treated rubber that hardened to imitate leather. This material predates the arrival of plastic as a means of separating objects from the entropic processes of nature. In this display, we turn the viewer’s attention to the oft-overlooked decorative cases, each with a unique design embossed on their surface.
The one exception is a single photograph of Zadock Pratt riding in the carriage on display in the next room. This depiction of Pratt stands out as an unusually informative object in the museum’s collection, offering viewers a glimpse at what his daily life might have looked like.
It’s notable that one of the earliest plastics, celluloid, was developed as a cheap alternative to ivory. Though too flammable for everyday use, it became ubiquitous in photographic and cinematic processes and eventually replaced the fragile and impractical glass-based daguerreotypes. This connection between image-making and early industrialization reveals a deep entanglement with the plasticity of the contemporary moment. These portraits reflect a time when surface and presentation—though mechanized—still bore the tactile imprint of the human hand.
Daguerreotype Wall, fifteen daguerreotypes housed in vulcanite cases. All courtesy The Zadock Pratt Museum collection.
Contemporarty Objects
On left: Catherine Telford-Keogh (Mint Condition), 2022, Mixed Media.
On right: Tony Bluestone Reality Plays Itself, 2025, Oil, acrylic, colored pencil on canvas, and pine.
Tony Bluestone
One of the most essential materials in the tanning process was bark from hemlock trees. Over roughly thirty years of production, most of the hemlocks throughout the Catskills were depleted. In this painting, Bluestone explores the space between the production of a material, its use-value, its imitation, and the notion of the "original." The bark in the painting was rendered directly from life—a hemlock tree observed in person—while the pine board, which is tucked into the corner of the canvas, is a manufactured object, purchased from a hardware store. Bluestone initially drew this imitation pine by hand, only to later obscure it with an oil-encrusted layer of hemlock bark.
In doing so, he plays with themes of manufacturing and the illusory nature of materials. The work investigates the plasticity of reality—what is real, what is simulated, and what undergoes transformation to become a final product. In an age when many goods are produced far from our view, detached from any sense of origin or labor, his painting challenges the viewer to consider what is authentic and what is constructed, asking us to examine the invisible processes behind what we consume.
Catherine Telford-Keogh
As mentioned above, transportation was essential to the early industrial process, and it is still so today. Catherine Telford-Keogh uses her practice to highlight the ways we use material to preserve goods for transport. She says, “Embedded within these stone matrices are artifacts of daily consumption: packaged foods, plastic containers, synthetic wrappings. Each object remains sealed in its original packaging—clamshells holding produce, vacuum-sealed proteins, bottles of condiments—suspended beneath a membrane of plant-based resin and museum-grade plexiglas. This transparent layer functions like geological amber, creating fossils of the immediate present. The preserved foods exist in artificial stasis, their expiration dates rendered meaningless, their promise of freshness eternally deferred.”
Contemporary capitalism is increasingly able to distribute goods across vast distances, store them for extended periods, and move them at unprecedented speeds—thanks in large part to plastic and preservatives. Plastic acts as a protective membrane, wrapping and shielding the outsourced products of global trade as they travel. In Catherine Telford Keogh’s work, plastic becomes more than packaging; she explores it as a boundary layer, probing its relationship to the environments from which materials are extracted. Her pieces bring us back to the earth, grounding the artificial in the organic. The marble she uses—often cut from kitchen countertops—forms intricate matrices that act as containers. This repurposed marble evokes both domesticity and geological time, connecting the synthetic with the natural in unexpected ways.
Foreground left: Catherine Telford-Keogh Low Life (Rose Rut), 2022, Mixed Media.
Background right: Linnea Gad, Flapper, 2025, Ceramic and steel.
Linnea Gad
Pratt’s tannery was located in these mountains due to the availability of essential materials for the tanning process. This region allowed him to scale up production because both the trees and water had the specific properties required. While the hides and commerce were based elsewhere, this area served as an ideal site for production. The bark from local hemlock trees provided the tannins needed for tanning, and water from nearby waterfalls helped power the machinery.
In this room, Linnea Gad’s pieces reflect the layered nature of making. In her work, she applies multiple layers of slip to build up the surface, mimicking the texture and process of bark formation. Through this deliberate layering and her human intervention, she achieves an ethereal effect that hints at what lies beneath the surface. Each layer seems to act as a protective threshold for what comes next.
In a similar way, we can consider the immense labor required to log the trees, haul them from the forest to the tannery, and strip their bark. The workers engaged in a process of surface removal—peeling back one layer to serve another: the surface of the tanned leather.
Em Rooney
These two sister sculptures draw attention to how the material functions, or once functioned. The bridle, for example, is crafted from the best and toughest leather, built to endure weathering and the constant strain of a horse’s pull. Rooney juxtaposes this tangle of leather with a sculpture made from twisted acrylic plastic—repurposed surplus from the production of hand-held beer taps.
Throughout the exhibition, leather strapping appears repeatedly, reflecting its widespread use during the historical period in question. By visually pairing entangled leather with tangled plastic, Rooney underscores how synthetic materials like plastic have become deeply embedded in contemporary culture, echoing the functional roles once filled by natural materials. As Heather Davis observes in Plastic Matters, “when plastic was first emerging but quickly coming to define consumer capitalism, it ‘was marked as a substance that was not degraded by history or nature.’ Plastic represented a resplendent new world, free from the demands of death and decay.”
Hugo Montoya
The carriage on view, originally belonging to Zadock Pratt himself, would have been a symbol of status in his day. It also reminds us of how physically demanding it was to move goods and people in the 19th century. Today, the car has replaced the carriage, becoming not just a means of transport but a cultural icon.
In this work, Hugo Montoya transforms this historic carriage with a modern plexiglass decal inspired by tribal tattoos—motifs that, though rooted in specific cultures, have become flattened and commercialized through mass production. The design evokes the aesthetics of car culture, reflecting how industry has shaped not only how we move, but how we express identity in an image-based, plastic-driven world.By merging 19th-century craftsmanship with contemporary materials and symbols, Montoya draws a line between the birth of industrial transportation and today’s mediated, mass-produced culture.
Pohan
An antique carriage belonging to Zadock Pratt, the founder of Prattsville and layer of the first town roads, is on display in the central exhibition area. Mounted in one corner behind the carriage, an industrial scenting system emits a custom aroma. The scent’s formula is based upon the car industry’s manufactured “new car smell”, whose aromatic notes are the result of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released by materials used in car interiors, primarily from plastics, adhesives, and fabrics such as real and faux leather. In an adjacent corner is a standing speaker. The speaker plays a recording of a female vocalist attempting - and failing - to recreate the sounds of a Tesla electric vehicle.
Foreground left: Em Rooney, Twin Portrait, 2025, Antique reins, acrylic, polymer, resin, and mica.
Background right: Hugo Montoya, Rolling in The Grave, 2025, Antique carriage, plexiglass.
[Not pictured] Pohan, Female Vocalist Approximates a Tesla Model X, 2025, Digital audio, 6M 41s on loop, speaker, stand; Vocalist: Kamala Sankaram.
[Not pictured] Pohan, New Car Smell Formula 001, 2025, Essential oils and scent machine.