Painted Stories: Susan Hoffer at LGAP

The day we were sent home to stay home. March 13, 2020. Essex County, NY

In a time when many museums and galleries are closed to the public, those few that continue to fulfill their mission of mounting new shows that can be viewed in person are especially valuable.

One of those crucial venues is the Lake George Arts Project's Courthouse Gallery in Lake George Village, which hardly skipped a beat in its exhibition roster through the pandemic, and currently hosts an outstanding solo show of paintings by the Adirondack artist Susan Hoffer.

Entitled Painted Stories, the collection of 21 recent works holds together nearly perfectly as a solid body of work built around the theme of technology's place in our daily lives, with an awareness of current events and deeply personal connections as a complex underlay. In other words, these paintings are ripe with content, living up to the show's title, while simultaneously being subtle and intimate.

From the Warsaw Ghetto to Lake Clear: Never Again

Hoffer has a lot going for her here: First, her technique is off the charts. Working in oil on cradled hardwood, she layers glazes of transparent color under heavily built-up impasto to achieve both a luminosity and an extremely active surface, a rare combination of effects. She also organizes her space, and the people and objects within it, with the confidence of an orchestra conductor, making for compositions that are particularly engaging.

Hoffer's paintings are portraits, but they are equally domestic interiors - think of Vermeer as a comparable example. And, like Vermeer, Hoffer uses lens-based technology extensively as a base for her creations. Don't misunderstand - this is NOT photorealism. Rather, it is a carefully honed process that utilizes a multitude of photographs for reference, often incorporating visual effects that can come from the subject having been seen through a lens. 

The resulting pictures are bathed in a dazzling light, highly detailed, and realistically representational - but they never appear to be anything other than a painting, and they feature many beautiful passages of paint and color, more than enough to satisfy lovers of that sort of thing. Further, these luscious paintings show as much attention to mundane objects - say, a glass of beer - as to people's faces, maybe even more in some instances, which I find intriguingly rigorous.

6 Things You Need to Know This Morning

So we have a painter of stories who is also a painter of floors, and fabrics, and furniture. The evocative titles, the carefully arranged scenes, and the people depicted combine to provide context and develop deeper meaning to each work, but one can also simply get lost in the lush strokes of paint.

This is why it's so important to see these paintings in person - trust me, they just don't translate online (worthwhile art rarely does). Instead, allowing your eyes to roam over their surfaces will amply reward the time and effort spent in going to the gallery.

Watching the healthcare debate:
No pre-existing conditions allowed

That said, there's a lot more to these elaborate compositions than sensual pleasure. What started out in 2017 as a thoughtful painter's response to our nation's particular and peculiar political situation, evolved in 2020 into a meditation on the effects of the pandemic, and the direct or indirect way the situation was enmeshed with our dependence on electronic devices.

Thus, in all but five of the works presented here, the subjects are absorbed with looking at a screen, or, if not directly looking, they also aren't looking out at the viewer, and a screen or other device is present. (In the show's only self-portrait, Hoffer is shown in her studio listening to a podcast while she stares off into space.) One is made to ask: What does this say about our time and its preoccupations? In the effort to stay informed and connected, are we losing more than we're gaining? Alternately, in the handful of paintings where we are directly confronted by the subject, we are forced to have quite other kinds of thoughts, about that person, their circumstances, and what all of that may mean to us personally. Either way, it's quite a powerful experience.

Painted Stories: new work by Susan Hoffer will remain on view at the Courthouse Gallery through February 19. The gallery is currently open by appointment only, preferably with 24 hours' notice. Call 518-323-5499, ​or ​email laura@lakegeorgearts.org to schedule your visit.

The moment you understand white privilege and decide to act for the greater good

Masterful prints at the Fenimore Art Museum

Albrecht Dürer - Agony in the Garden (Christ on the Mount of Olives), 1508
detail of a print from the Engraved Passion series

It can be easy to overlook printmaking as an art form, especially in our current digital age, where a few clicks will get you a nice image made of ink on paper. But two very different shows currently on view at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown serve as timely reminders that it wasn’t always so easy, and that it still takes vision to make easy into wonderful.

All fans of visual art know the name Albrecht Dürer, but most of us probably didn’t know that Dürer “singlehandedly transformed printmaking from a craft to a fine art” in the late 1400s and early 1500s, as postulated and amply demonstrated by the traveling exhibition Albrecht Dürer: Master Prints, on loan to FAM through Nov. 22 from Pennsylvania’s Reading Public Museum.

Fall of Man from the Small Woodblock Passion, c. 1510

The show includes more than 20 examples of Dürer’s woodblocks and copper engravings, including all 16 of the “Engraved Passion” series. Though the prints are quite small (typically about 2.5 by 4.5 inches), they are packed with detail; and, though they are monochromatic, they feature an engaging range of tones and textures, emphasized by Dürer’s signature chiaroscuro style. A few examples of work by contemporaries who influenced or were influenced by Dürer are also included here, and they provide the context to support the idea that his work transcended illustration to achieve true artistic expression in a medium generally meant for popular consumption.

Not that Dürer eschewed popularity – on the contrary, according to the exhibition wall text, “his prints circulated throughout Europe, making him one of the most influential artists of his age.” Something like today’s YouTube or Instagram stars, he gave the people what they wanted, providing his own special twists in the form of naturalistic curiosities, bravura line work, and visual puzzles. The woodblock print Fall of Man provides one example of these strengths – whereas a simple rendering of Adam and Eve with the snake would do, Dürer adds other animals such as a bear (or is it a boar?) and a peeping lion, along with his classic personal logo on a trompe l’oeil metal tag.

Joachim and the Angel from The Life of the Virgin, 1504

Dürer honed his craft and his vision during a trip to Italy in his 20s – no surprise that exposure to the culture that spawned Renaissance art would make him a better artist, too – but his work still radiates a German sensibility in its emotional restraint and controlled, almost analytical approach. Equally, the religious and moral subject matter of these images speaks of their time and place, and presumably of Dürer’s Christian devotion, but there’s much more than Biblical storytelling to their content. Another fine example is Christ Shown to the People, in which several exquisitely detailed human figures, a darkly vivid forest, and a microscopic farming scene are all crammed into a small engraving, emulating some of the best qualities of Italian art of the time.

All in all, with a little patience (and maybe a magnifying glass, available for use in the museum), this display of Dürer’s master works will greatly reward any visitor.

Kykuit Estate, Tarrytown, New York

Flashing forward to the 21st century, an exhibition of beautifully realized inkjet-printed photographs by Steve Gross and Susan Daley entitled Blue Gardens makes a strong complement to the Dürer show.

Gross and Daley work as a duo, and they built this collection of images over more than a decade (mixed in with other projects), by visiting numerous venerable parks and estates to capture their seemingly timeless outdoor spaces using digital cameras.

The resulting show of 22 prints, all of them transformed to the mellow blue tones of a cyanotype, provides both a document of these special places and a lush and pensive visual style that the pair have cultivated over many decades of photographing landscapes and gardens together. The beautiful consistency of this group belies the diversity of its subjects, ranging from South Carolina to Upstate N.Y.

Untermyer Park, Yonkers, New York

All but two of the prints are a medium size for photographs (about 11” by 18”), which is small enough to draw you in close, but still big enough to allow you to enter the space and peruse the finely rendered details of plants, statuary, architectural elements, and water features (natural or man-made). Two of the prints are much larger (about 30” by 40”), which helps them work well when viewed from a distance, and emphasizes their strong compositional effects.

In many of these pictures, the sky is a powerful presence. This may have been part of the reason for printing in blue, or just a happy byproduct of the decision to render the gardens themselves in blue, but the effect of that choice works beautifully (I have tried to imagine these images in a classic grey monotone instead, and it doesn’t seem to work at all). In any case, the skies are crucial to the work precisely because, while the rest of the subject matter is virtually unchanged from its inception a century or more ago, the ever-changing sky captured in a fleeting moment firmly anchors the images as photographs, timeless though they may seem.

Blue Gardens will remain on view at FAM through Dec. 31.

Steve Gross and Susan Daley - Crane Estate, Ipswich, Massachusetts

MASS MoCA, at last

A view of James Turrell's Into the Light at MASS MoCA

A recent survey reported that just 13% of Americans are happy - the other 87%, may simply need a visit to MASS MoCA.

A lot of people hear the words "contemporary art" and immediately think they can't relate (why they seem to think they can relate better to 19th-century art - i.e. Monet - is beyond me). But the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams is so friendly, and the art there so fresh and varied, that I believe it could make many converts of those stodgy grumps.

On a recent (much delayed) foray, my wife and I viewed nine exhibitions (among many others), and we really had a good time doing it. Need I explain that the place is huge, with nine buildings and some spaces so vast they might be better measured in acres than square feet? So it requires stamina, and a lot of time, if you want to try to see it all.

Blane De St. Croix - Hollow Ground 2020
(seen during site-specific installation)

The primary temporary show, entitled How to Move a Landscape, features several monumental works by Blane De St. Croix, an eco-artist committed to battling climate change by making art about the effects it can have in far-flung places, such as above the Arctic Circle. It also includes a great deal of smaller-scale work, covering a range of media from drawing to sculpture, installation, animation, and video, in addition to a research section that offers sketches, photographs, and other ephemera.

Unlike most political artists, De St. Croix hasn't lost his sense of humor - much of his work is quite playful, even as it confronts our pending global disaster. Notable in this regard is an electric train set that runs in a circle near the entrance to the exhibition, piercing a wall tunnel-like twice as it goes round and round. Its cars are loaded with modeled tranches of tundra, neatly offering a solution to the show's titular problem.

This witty miniature is balanced by a massive, tilting construction in the huge gallery beyond that looks for all the world like a life-size swath of melting glacier, which you can perambulate and walk under, and even poke your head up into (via some of its melty craters). Technically, De St. Croix's sculptural illusion is effective, yet it's also obviously a physically challenging bit of installation. Entitled Hollow Ground, I found it very likable and, frankly, far more interesting live than it looks in pictures.

Ad Minoliti - Fantasias Modulares

Underscoring De St. Croix's emphasis on scale is a "monumental miniature" entitled Broken Landscape IV that depicts a long, deep slice of the U.S./Mexican border. The meticulously crafted sculpture stands eye-high, and is dozens of feet long, with tiny details of grass, telephone wires, and, of course, the barrier fence marching along its surface.

Near the sprawling St. Croix exhibition is a relatively small one-room installation by the Argentine artist Ad Minoliti that more than makes up for its size by deploying great swaths of cartoon-bright colors. Indeed, Minoliti is something like Disney for the cultural elite (that's us, dear reader!), and served on this visit as a delightful palate cleanser as we moved on through the museum.

Ledelle Moe, whose massive concrete heads and figures occupy the famously football field-sized Building 5, is another sculptor utilizing scale to powerful effect. Entitled When, the installation seems to impose silent contemplation on its viewers, similar to the awestruck effect of standing in a vast temple or cathedral.

Ledelle Moe - Remain  at left; Congregation at right

While this collection includes works from as early as 2005, the show's central piece is current. 2019's Remain is an 18-foot-high kneeling female figure that evokes the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. In addition to the figure, Remain incorporates a complex scaffolding of metal rods that support innumerable small concrete forms of uncertain identity. The sculpture is deeply impressive even while remaining rather mysterious, as is the rest of the work in this show.

Another sprawling exhibition currently at MASS MoCA, entitled Kissing through a Curtain, engages with questions of communication, crossing borders (its 10 artists come from all over the world), and - obliquely - our current crises of COVID and racial injustice. Unfortunately, I found the work simply didn't engage my interest, much of it seeming to try too hard.

Justin Favela - Popocatepetl e Iztaccihuatl vistos desde Atlixco,
after Jose Maria Velasco, 2016

In one example, Justin Favela's painstaking paper and glue renderings of numerous landscape paintings by Jose Maria Velasco, which are provided as a starting point for the show, come off as merely colorful kitsch. In another, Kim Faler has suspended a panoply of enlarged sculptural renderings of chewed wads of bubble gum. Are you kidding me? In the end, I couldn't find the inspiration to care about any of these artists' obsessions.

On the other hand, the Them and Us/Ellos y Nosotros exhibition by the Mexican-American artist ERRE (aka Marcos Ramirez), communicates and engages effectively across languages and and borders, using varied media while literally straddling the frontier between Tijuana and San Diego.

I loved this show for its audacity in making art out of common materials such as printed metal signs, cloth fabric, wood, neon, and kernels of corn, and for its liberal incorporation of the Spanish language (significantly, there are more than 50 million Spanish speakers in the U.S., though it is still not an official language here).

ERRE - Orange Country

ERRE (the written rendering of the Spanish rolled "r") is an ingenious creator whose installation at MASS MOcA incorporates a full-scale re-creation of a section of border wall as a divider between the show and the rest of the space on the second floor of Building 6 (a fabulous building, by the way, which opened about three years ago and is gorgeous all by itself).

His messages are both simple and complex, featuring a mysterious video of a fictional desert crime scene, proverbs presented as shimmering metallic-colored eye charts, a four-poster bed with a map of Mexico in pounded nails, and an elegant but deeply chilling curved cage. For me, this is what political art strives to be, but so rarely succeeds.

Wendy Red Star - Medicine Crow

More educational than political, but very pointedly cultural, is an exhibition in MASS MoCA's Kidspace gallery by the Native American artist Wendy Red Star. In Apsáalooke: Children of the Large-Beaked Bird, Red Star uses altered archival photographs to examine historical truths about her Apsáalooke (Crow) nation, and creates large-format color self-portraits that debunk stereotypical views of Native Americans.

Not just for children, this work is witty, well crafted, and draws you in. Though a timed reservation for the smallish Kidspace is recommended, we were allowed to walk in, as the space wasn't at capacity. Also, it's possible to visit just the Kidspace gallery without paying admission to MASS MoCA, should you so desire.

Speaking of planning ahead, in these pandemic days one must set up a timed entry ticket to visit MASS MoCA (and masks are, of course, required) but it's such a huge space that keeping adequate distance once inside is no problem. I found it easy to reserve a timed arrival window online, and when we got there a few minutes late due to road construction delays, we were ushered in with a welcoming smile.

More urgently, to view James Turrell's truly extraordinary exhibition Into the Light, one must gain a specific timed entry slot by "purchasing" a free ticket online. If you do, you will be treated to an immersive experience unlike anything you've ever been through (see images at top and bottom of this post). In it, your retinas will get a bit of a workout, and your cones (the color receptors) will be having a ball.

An example of a James Turrell hologram

Turrell is a light sculptor. How do you sculpt with light? Turrell does it by creating smooth, deep, white spaces and then washing them with liquid color. The illusions thus created are mesmerizingly potent. In one of the works constructed at MASS MoCA (and officially scheduled through 2025, though we were told that was extended to 2042), you enter the space and see effects both inside it (i.e. around yourself and the others in there with you) and outside its entrance (where the colors change magically in response to your eyes' mechanisms). It's hard to describe, but unforgettable.

Additionally, there are quite a few other works by Turrell, including about half-a-dozen holographic projections, numerous very sleek architectural models of his plans for lightworks inside a crater he owns in Arizona, and several other individual light sculptures, one of which resembles a snowy black-and-white TV screen (though it is actually a shaped, empty void). Some of these require that you enter a darkened space through labyrinthine path, and then let your eyes adjust. Others work in ambient light, creating spatial illusions that are simply fascinating. Go and see for yourself.

Note: Ledelle Moe's When is scheduled to end on Jan. 3, 2021, and ERRE's Them and Us will run through summer 2021, while the other shows we viewed appear to be ongoing, either without a published ending date or with one very far in the future.

It's also worth noting that When and Them and Us are curated by Susan Cross, who is the juror of this year's Mohawk-Hudson Regional Exhibition, set to open at the Albany Institute of History & Art on Sept. 19.

A view of James Turrell's Into the Light at MASS MoCA

William Stone "Apperception" at Hudson Hall

Seated and Seatless 2006

Serendipity was my friend a week ago when I was in Hudson on a Tuesday for business unrelated to art, but ended up seeing a really cool art show anyway. Galleries aren't generally open at that time of the week in weekender-centric Hudson, but Hudson Hall was, and William Stone's solo show there proved to be worth the trip by itself.

Entitled Apperception, this collection of nearly 30 works spans the past decade (with a few earlier pieces) and provides a good range of freestanding and wall-mounted examples of this very witty sculptor's output. Working mostly in wood, Stone likes to play games with our perceptions by transforming familiar objects and materials with both dry and playful attitudes.

Some of the wall pieces use found paintings as their foundation, combining respect and irreverence in equal measure to elevate such mundane objects into something more. These include Orogeny, where a mountainscape has been jigsawed so it pops off the wall, and Signatures, a favorite piece of mine in which Stone has excised and lovingly reframed a constellation of just the signatures from half-a-dozen or so garage-sale paintings.

Live Edge Out 2018

Other wall works feature unfinished bark or slabs of lumber as the picture itself, flush-mounted or framed suitably in raw wood. These sculptures were not equally successful, but they all have the quality of making the viewer see something freshly, a worthy purpose for a piece of art. The rest of Stone's work in this exhibition (all of it freestanding) accomplishes that same goal quite neatly.

I should stop for a moment here to note that Stone is not just playing - he executes each piece with consummate craftsmanship, creating cleanly finished objects that use the qualities of fine woodcraft to mimic functionality, while simultaneously undermining it.

Fall Line 1991

So when Stone transforms three nondescript wooden chairs into one extraordinary one, by slicing them apart and reassembling them, you end up with a perfect illustration of the cliché "greater than the sum of its parts." And you can still sit on it.

Other altered chairs make up a good part of the rest of the show, along with more complex pieces of furniture apparently built from scratch. Another favorite of mine shown here is among the most recent - Stair Share, from 2019, evokes an Escher illusion, but it's neither illusory nor impossible. Rather, it is both pointless and potentially handy - a clever bit of tongue-in-cheek commentary on our fascination with finely crafted objects and their uses.

I enjoy Stone for his simplicity - or directness - and for his sly sense of humor. You will, too.

Hudson Hall (aka Hudson Opera House) is in the middle of Warren Street and is open every day. The exhibition runs through March 15.

Stair Share 2019

Pulse at Carrie Haddad Gallery

Pulse artists include, from left, Jeanette Fintz, Dai Ban, and Ginny Fox

photo provided by gallery

An outstanding show of abstract art is currently on view at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, but you'll need to get there soon, as it closes on Sept. 15. Pulse: Color & Form in a Visual Rhythm features the paintings of Jeanette Fintz, Jenny Kemp, and Ginny Fox, and the sculptures of Dai Ban. The four artists works are successfully mixed in the installation, but the gallery's several rooms also provide areas that focus on each artist individually, a best-of-both-worlds scenario.

Dai Ban - If You Touch Me, I Will Push You to the End
precision board, lacquer paint

I was already familiar with two of the artists (Fintz and Kemp), but the bodies of work presented here were mostly new to me so, along with the discovery of Ban and Fox, the show felt very fresh. Fintz is given pride of place among the selection, with her latest large-scale paintings displayed in the big front room of the gallery - and, frankly, they deserve it. Blending tight, mathematically precise forms with free, liquid washes, in a scaled down desert palette, Fintz's layered images are both striking and subtle. They draw from the impact of form and size, but also from the lasting power of complexity. Truly great stuff.

Ginny Fox - C18-9, acrylic on two panels

Ban's wall-mounted constructions hark back in form and color to both early and late Modernism, evoking Russian Suprematists as well as '60s minimalists, but they still feel contemporary, perhaps due to their elegantly crafted shapes and surfaces. Built of thick planes combined into angular reliefs, then finished with flat pigment or bright metal leaf, his pieces are lively explorations of dancing motion. The evocative titles he gives these works add a surprising emotional element, further placing them squarely in the present. 

Jenny Kemp - Raised, acrylic on linen panel

Kemp paints in parallel stripes, often curving them into sensual shapes that evoke body parts or other natural forms, but the work remains essentially geometric. Her masterful use of color relationships helps give these works the depth required to fascinate. Seeing her paintings in this exhibition gave me solace for having missed Kemp's solo show at Union College's Mandeville Gallery last year, though, to her credit, these are newer works. She moves fast and is definitely one to try to keep up with.

Forgive me for saying it, but I feel Fox is the weak link here. Her smeared and scraped acrylics seem to have some depth, but I doubt they could hold any serious viewer's attention for very long.

Jeanette Fintz - Permanently Temporary #1, acrylic on canvas