Future Perfect at UAlbany Art Museum

A group of drawings by Alexander Ross as seen in Future Perfect

The exhibition Future Perfect: Picturing the Anthropocene at the University at Albany Art Museum is a grand compendium of ideas
that handily meets its purpose to "explore and inform," but falls a bit short simply as an art exhibition.

Curated by Associate Professor Danny Goodwin, Director Janet Riker and Associate Director/Curator Corinna Ripps-Schaming, the show features significant individual pieces or bodies of work in a variety of media by 12 artists, augmented by 11 additional artists whose prints, drawn from the museum's permanent collection by participants in a class project, create a sidebar exhibition within Future Perfect.

Three sculptures by JoAnne Carson confront
three photographs by Miljohn and Heltoft

The anthropocene is the label now affixed to our current geological era, so named to reflect the changes to the earth's climate and ecology that human activity has caused. Much of the work that has been selected to represent this concept here leans toward the futuristic, including animated science fiction film projects by Colin C. Boyd and Jacolby Satterwhite, and colorful, cartoonish critter paintings by Alexander Ross.

Other improbables, in the form of fantastic plants, are presented in sculptures by JoAnne Carson and silver-print photographs by Miljohn Ruperto and Ulrik Heltoft. But not all the work shown in Future Perfect is obsessed with the future. I found the more interior-looking artists in the show were more effective.

An altered photograph by Letha Wilson

Several altered landscape photographs by Letha Wilson and three freestanding resin-bound sculptural montages by Amy Brener are both elegant and thought-provoking - the fact that these two groups are installed together suggests the curators also see a connection between them. I really liked seeing four leaning painted planks by Jason Middlebrook, an artist I first encountered in a 2007 solo show in this same space; and a quasi-narrative photo series by Dana Hoey that uses naturalistic subjects to evoke a chilling future.

A photograph of salamanders by Dana Hoey

The best part of the show for me, however, was the students' effort to make a statement along one long wall, where they sequenced photographs and prints in a way that clearly communicates a point of view and clearly articulates unanswered questions. This part included outstanding works by both widely known and local artists such as Marilyn Bridges, Michael Marston, Robert Smithson, and Ken Ragsdale.

Future Perfect: Picturing the Anthropocene, which runs through Dec 10, has featured a busy schedule of related events, including weekly programs in the gallery, since it opened in July; the next event is a poetry reading and discussion at 7 pm on Nov 29 - check here for more details.

Colin C. Boyd works on an animation project on-site at Future Perfect

Studio Visit: Terrance DePietro and Nicole Lemelin

A view of the studio shared by Terrance DePietro and Nicole Lemelin

photo by TDP

A unique pleasure comes from visiting artists in their studios, as it is a privilege to step inside the process of a creative mind and get below the surface of the work itself. So, a few weeks ago, I took advantage of an opportunity to hang out with Terrance DePietro and Nicole Lemelin (and a few other guests) at their shared work/live space in rural Palenville, N.Y., and it proved to be time very well spent.

DePietro: Intuitions Rising from the Crevice of The Clove
oil on canvas

DePietro and Lemelin joined forces a few years ago, while he was long established in Palenville and she was still living in her native Montreal, and they now have integrated their lives and art practice in a surprisingly seamless way. I had seen very little of either artist’s work before this foray to the Catskills, so I spent hours just taking it all in, punctuated by interludes of conversation and Niki and Terry’s kind hospitality.

Lemelin: In Luna's Womb - oil on canvas

These two mid-life painters share sensibilities so close that at first I had a little trouble telling their work apart (and that includes the vast majority of the work that was created before they even knew each other). But there are discernible differences (of course), even though the two are consistently driving at the same ideas. And, by “driving,” I mean working in a very directed and persistent manner.

DePietro: A Leap of Faith - linocut

I’m sorry to say it’s often easy to take art for granted – we are blessed with so many talented artists in our midst today that there isn’t enough space to show them all or time to see them all. Yet a studio visit will typically reveal a level of commitment that would rival that of any Fortune 500 CEO – with none of the rewards, by the way. It’s always impressive to me.

Lemelin: Presage of Transformation - watercolor and ink

DePietro and Lemelin exemplify this single-minded pursuit as well as anyone I have seen. The fact that, in their case, the pursuit has now become double-minded just adds to the potency of the message. And that message is – what? I see a bright thread of humanism and spirituality in everything the two of them produce, whether it is representational, purely abstract, surrealistic or expressionistic.

DePietro: Pristine Happiness of the Static Action of Art
digital monoprint

Some would quibble about a lack of consistency among these various modes – and here it is compounded by past and current involvement in many media by both artists, especially DePietro, who seems to do it all: Painting, photography, drawing, printmaking, digital. Lemelin also paints, draws, makes prints – and adds sculpture to the mix.

Lemelin: Bluemajic - oil on canvas

But there remains a clear vision within this vast, diverse output. And all the more clear because it is remarkably shared by two individuals. DePietro and Lemelin are visionaries who revel in their experience of humanity and nature. They delve, they experiment, they cull and refine. They work. The results are complex, not easily digested in a quick scan, and not easily explained. I see historical references, geology, dreams and nightmares here. I see joy and despair. I see struggle and triumph and the imperceptible march of time. I see nature reflected and refracted.

It’s powerful stuff – I’ll be going back.

DePietro: Above On and Below - photograph

Jim Shaw: Entertaining Doubts at MASS MoCA

Jim Shaw - The Rinse Cycle 2012 acrylic on muslin

Have you ever tried to describe a crazy dream you had, or tried to follow someone describing such a dream? Then you will have some idea what it's like to experience the large exhibition Entertaining Doubts by California artist Jim Shaw at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. Shaw draws a great deal from his dreams, and attempts to manifest them physically through sculpture, painting, and installation.

Alas, it is not an entirely successful effort, just as none of us has ever really adequately articulated our own dream or understood another's, but a lot of compelling and enjoyable art is created along the way, so it's also not a failure. Shaw has great skills in drawing and painting, and a good understanding of the theatrics that go into effective installations, and MASS MoCA gives him plenty of space to spread out in.

Jim Shaw - Frank Frazetta Figure 2013 - installation view

A signature of the show is Shaw's re-use of discarded painted theatrical backdrops. The worn texture of these huge curtains of muslin, and their time-softened colors, are very appealing, and Shaw makes the most of this appeal by limiting his interventions to partial overpainting or, in some cases, simple reinterpretation by the placement of flat figures in front. Shaw also takes smaller cuts of the backdrops and paints on them like stretched canvases. These are some of the best works in the show, perhaps because it is easier to digest them, or because smaller works can concentrate the idea better. (Mind you, in this context, small is relative: say, six feet rather than forty.)

Jim Shaw - Blake/Boring 2010
ink on paper 

Another key feature of Shaw's work is his impressive mastery of comic-book style inking, which he applies to various obsessions. Clearly, he is a child of the '50s and '60s, and is completely, unabashedly in love with Superman, whose image is captured, transformed, fractured and fragmented in many ways here.

Sources as disparate as William Blake and Walt Disney are blended into the Superman myth as processed by Shaw, connecting the visionary's Songs of Innocence and Experience to the Seven Dwarves and then linking it to Kryptonite.

Jim Shaw - Fire Female 2012
faux hair wigs with airbrush

Again, I think these elements come across best when simplified, as when Shaw groups giant cutout drawings of Superman's body parts into a wall-mounted installation, or in another installation where the black-ink area of the superhero's costume shorts turns out to be a portal into a plastic dreamworld of glowing colored crystals (shown below).

Shaw also shines in book-page-scale drawings of vortices, swirls of hair, and others of his many obsessions (architecture, the human body, American Indians, snakes, and Wagner's Ring series among them).

Shaw's sculptural forays include architectural dioramas, amusing surrealistic furniture designs (such as a nose-shaped wall sconce), and bizarre wigs, which also appear in a series of paintings made over inkjet prints, rather than discarded muslin. These paintings extend Shaw's technique of altering given imagery and introduce a self-conscious reference to art history in the form of a white rectangle cut out of the colorful image, then replaced outside it as a gray-toned expressionist swirl.

Meaning what? As with the dreams, I couldn't quite get inside Shaw's head to understand the point. But I'm grateful that it's such an active place, and that an artist of Shaw's ability makes the effort to take us there. Entertaining Doubts continues through February 2016.

Jim Shaw - The Issue of My Loins 2015 (installation detail)

In addition to Jim Shaw, MASS MoCA is currently featuring several other exhibitions. Two that are particularly worthy of note:

Eclipse is a remarkable, immersive video installation by Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris in collaboration with the ecological writer Elizabeth Kolbert that commemorates the passenger pigeon on the 100th anniversary of its extinction (image at left).

Not only a powerfully moving experience of what the incredibly numerous birds were once able to do (i.e. blot out the sky), Eclipse is a brilliant example of digital technology put to an innovative purpose as art. It also offers a beautifully produced oversized publication free to visitors. Eclipse is a must-see; it continues through Sept. 1.

Bibliotecaphilia is a group show curated by Allie Foradas with support from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute that brings together six very diverse artists around the theme of books.

It includes a complex interactive installation by Jonathan Gitelson that invites visitors to spend time with a great variety of books annotated by their former owners; Dan Peterman's wonderful sculpture titled The Polymer Catalog - one ton archive, which looks like massive stacks of books but is just slices of colorful recycled plastic boards; Meg Hitchcock's painstaking and beautifully transcendent collages made of individual letters cut from holy books; and a large-scale carved wooden screen by Susan Hefuna.

Also included in Bibliotecaphilia are Jean Prebe's site-specific sculpture titled The Secret Lives of Books (pictured below), and an adults-only series of nine videos by Clayton Cubitt titled Hysterical Literature, in each of which a woman sits at a table and reads aloud from a book of her choosing until she has an orgasm (you don't see what's going on below the table, but it apparently involves a skillfully wielded vibrator).

Bibliotecaphilia continues through the end of 2015.

37th Annual Photography Regional

Beau Comeaux - Rubble

The 37th Annual Photography Regional is both a glimpse of the past and a window on the future. Hosted this year by The Sage Colleges' Opalka Gallery, the Photo Regional's present iteration is a truly fresh experience that also speaks clearly to the show's long and influential history.

Steven Fink - SX-70 iPhone, 2014

Featuring 80 works by 39 artists, the show was ably and amiably judged by the collaborating duo Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, who filled the capacious gallery with a broad sampling of styles, often choosing three or more pieces by individual makers, which gives the show a welcome depth often missing from such juried affairs. Prizes, chosen by the ParkeHarrisons, went to nine recipients, including two prizes given to student work, a first for the Regional in my memory.

Overall, I got some very strong impressions of where art photography is at in 2015, and I liked what I saw: A lot of black-and-white work (whether digital or traditional); a good amount of strong color abstraction; a great deal of personal documentary; and some experimental/technical stuff - but very little of what I would call "postmodern," especially of the often annoying "created to be photographed" genre.

Erin Shipley - Yielding Defects #3, 2013

In other words, if this is the photography of the future, then the future is having a healthy reconsideration of the deeply felt and, to me, quite righteous photographic concerns of the past. The fact that 11 of the 39 included photographers are students (blindly chosen) is particularly encouraging - actually, some of the best work in the show is by students, and that includes both old-fashioned and progressive styles of work. There are also appearances from some of the Regional's earliest regulars (i.e. folks who showed in the Regional as far back as the late '70s) and, in another possible first, a father and his son (Steven and Jeremy Fink) are both included.

Larry White - Mantle, 2014

And, speaking of Steven Fink, I was surprised that his five large, boldly vibrant color prints, which introduce the installation with a happy shout, did not get even an honorable mention; though I have no quibble with the jurors' prize picks on the whole, I just don't get how you can like it enough to give it that much space, but not better than some other work that was otherwise rather modestly featured. Bold color also makes an appearance in the form of a terrific one-liner from the ironically surnamed Larry White, in which a wild painting above a mantle announces itself with a tiny but sharply visible signature.

Brian Williams - Pieces of 2, 2014

Also appealing are a handful of collaged, montaged, or digitally painted pieces by Liv Zabka, Treha Myth Downey, Brian Williams, and George Guarino. All make great use of a few of the zillions of possibilities that digital photography offers, without overdoing it. Beau Comeaux, a Sage photo professor, also uses the new technology, but he makes moody, timeless, almost spooky images with the big color printer, and they are toned down rather than pumped up, color-wise.

Jess Ayotte - Lucid Dream

But it's the more traditional work that steals this show - whether monochromatic, subtly colored or, as in several cases, using both color and black and white in the same presentation, these works delve into the personal stories and histories that make up so much of the great photography of the past. None is more effective than top prize winner Daesha Devon Harris, who pairs very fine square-format color portraits with small, grainy black-and-white transparencies of the same people seen in earlier times, then adds poetically evocative titles. Her works succeed by making the personal universal, in this case projecting black history onto the black individuals she lovingly portrays.

Also outstanding are three creepy Joel-Peter Witkin homages by Jess Ayotte in delicious black inkjet on paper, and Matthew Klein's lush prints that evoke the great Chicago street photography of Harry Callahan - or that of William Klein (a relative perhaps?), both working in the '50s and '60s. I'm not on a nostalgia trip, but I love seeing this excellent work from so many photographers who may very well be dreaming of the past, or at least look as though they do.

Matthew Klein - Oh Darling, 2013

Theme and Variations: Gail Nadeau at FMCC

An installation view of Angelus at FMCC

The show Angelus by Gail Nadeau at the Perrella Gallery of Fulton-Montgomery Community College in Johnstown raises a lot of wonderful questions. The very talented Nadeau works in digital media as well as traditional forms such as silver-based photography and oil paint, and all are present in this 60-piece installation.

Is it a retrospective? Well, there are images from 1985, 2014 and in-between. But, no, it’s not a retrospective. Is Nadeau a photographer, a painter, or what? Well, she does show photographs here, and very painterly mixed-media pieces. But, no, I wouldn’t call her either a photographer or a painter. Rather, I think printmaker would be the correct term.

Diamond Studded Dress with Rock

Are digital prints really art? Well, that depends. In this case, Nadeau presents a lot of digital prints, and 48 of them are of almost exactly the same composition – yet I feel that this display would convince even the most die-hard skeptic that this digital work is indeed art. And how is that? Well, let me tell you …

Among the intriguing selection of images in this collection are a handful of traditional black-and-white photographs (output as inkjet prints but, trust me, you won’t see the difference) and one rather large color photograph, which is the template for most of the other prints in the show. There are also a few  pieces that read as collage paintings, which use an inkjet print of a mixed-media image as the underpainting of the final creation.

Plum

The black-and-whites and the colorful combines all include female figures, from babies to girls to women to possible fairies or angels, and all are wearing flowing dresses. Nadeau explains in a quite readable artist statement her fascination with the dress as a touchstone and a symbol; then she treats it as her theme.

Using the one, simple composition from her original color photograph of a white christening gown suspended on a thin hanger flat against a wall, with a spray of wildflowers on the floor nearby and part of a framed picture on the wall, Nadeau riffs endlessly in a digital environment, adding color and texture, changing contrast, and slightly altering the compositional elements.

The Disappearance

The result is (perhaps surpri- singly) completely absorbing. Many of the images are very small (in fact, the largest are just 12 by 13 inches), but they are power-packed. The intimate nooks of the Perrella provide numerous spots for small groups of framed prints as well as single ones, and the gallery’s most prominent wall holds the show’s coup-de-grace, a stunning grid of 30 unframed prints with black borders.

The tininess of Nadeau’s smallest prints (they are about 3.5 by 4.5 inches) demands close inspection, and it is always richly rewarded. One group of three, at a distance, seems largely monochromatic; but up close, their muted tones reveal sparks of bright color. Many of the prints do use black, but often with such elaborate textures that they glitter like silver. Others use big spots of primaries like yellow or blue, thereby reaching out to grab us from across the room.

This body of work is about process, as is all true printmaking, and it is also about transformation. It is not to be missed.

Note: Angelus has been extended - it was to end on Oct. 31, but will now remain on view through Nov. 14. Gallery hours are M-F, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. or by appointment 518-736-3622 Ext. 8977.