Short Take: Fence Select 21 at ACCR

A New Blank Tablet: January 20, 2021 12:00 PM EST, oil on cradled hardwood by Susan Hoffer, is the juror's top choice in Fence Select 21

I’ve been remiss in taking so long to get to this year’s Fence Select show at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, because it always features a wide swath of the region’s best and upcoming artists, and it ends this Saturday. But, as I am often forced to say, better late than never.

This year’s edition of the show was juried by Dan Cameron, a noted critic whose local presence seems to be increasing lately, and the 51 artists included are overall quite worthy. I regularly refer to this annual exhibition as “the other Regional,” and this year’s edition pretty much lives up to the title; seven of the included artists were also in the 2021 Mohawk-Hudson Regional, and several others have been in previous editions of that show.

William Fillmore's Red Warning #2;
in the background is a painting
by D. Colin

photo provided

My biggest quibble with the current edition of Fence is that only a few of the selected artists have more than one work in it (specifically, six artists have two each) and those works aren’t presented together in any case. But the gallery looks good with the show as installed, and there are very few clunkers in it (I’ll leave it for you to decide which they are).

Among the outstanding pieces to my eye and mind were the following:

• First-prize winner Susan Hoffer’s impressively self-actualizing studio view titled A New Blank Tablet: January 20, 2021 12:00 PM EST
• ORT Project Rockwell-Nelson’s Anthropocene Epoch: Eat the Rich, a super-sharp photograph that features a live baboon in an oval-framed still life arrangement
• Chris DeMarco’s lush, yet delicately colored photographs of a trailer park
• Karen Gerstenberger’s two coastal monotypes
• Jaime Courcelle’s oil on canvas It’s Not Goodbye
• Take Out, a timely and wry nod to Edward Hopper by Marion Reynolds, and
• Michael Oatman’s elegiac stack of unwatched 9/11 videotapes (shown below)

The exhibition’s other prize-winners are Royal Brown, for a futurist reinvention of found objects; Jeff Wigman, for a Bosch-like painting on wood panel, and William Fillmore, for a strikingly geometric steel sculpture.

The ACCR is open every day but Sunday; Fence Select 21 ends Saturday, Dec. 11.

Ruminations on the Regional

The 2021 Mohawk Hudson Regional is a bit of a head-scratcher, not because it fails to represent the region’s range of outstanding artists (which is the show’s basic mission since its inception 85 years ago), but because it does so in a very cumbersome manner.

I submitted to the show this year, and so I can’t in good conscience write the critical review I’d like to, but it’s too important an event to merely pass over, so I’ll try to take an objective approach with this brief report.

First, some history. Over the past dozen years or so, the Annual Exhibition by Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region (its formal name) has been rotating among three sponsoring organizations: The Albany Institute of History & Art (its original organizer), The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, and the University at Albany Art Museum. A prior host, the Schenectady Museum, changed its mission from art to science some years back, leaving the Regional to wander a bit every third year, until the Hyde stepped up to fill the role of a third regular host. During that time, the show landed at least once at the Albany International Airport Gallery, a fact I mention because, this year, it’s there again (in part).

With the Institute, the Hyde, and the University as regular hosts, the Regional was doing fine, until COVID-19 hit. This disrupted the University Art Museum’s schedule to the point that it had to cancel its 2021 position in the Regional’s regular rotation, after which it was decided that the show would be managed by Albany Center Gallery (ACG). Being physically too small and insufficiently staffed to host the show alone, ACG then recruited additional space and support for the venture from The Sage Colleges’ OpalkaGallery and the Airport Gallery.

This solution, though a compromise, offered additional perks. Now, rather than having just one big show with one juror (the longstanding tradition), there would be three shows, each with its own juror, with all of the art still being drawn from a single pool of entries. Each venue selected a juror: Hudson gallerist Pamela Salisbury for the Opalka, local artist Alisa Sikelianos-Carter for ACG, and Seattle-area artist and arts administrator Tommy Gregory for the Airport – and the stage was set for a unique event.

The resulting tripartite exhibition features 143 works by a record 96 artists (14 of whom were also in the 2020 Regional). Unsurprisingly, this horde includes a number of familiar names, as well as a goodly smattering of new or lesser-known artists, the diversity of which the organizers had said was a goal for this year’s exhibition. While I didn’t love the new format, as an artist I was excited to think that I had three chances to be chosen (alas, that didn’t happen); an additional decision by the organizers to reduce the entry fee to just $10 (from about $40 in past years) made it even more appealing.

Now, as an audience member, I have a couple of problems with the arrangement. First, in order to take in the entire selection as one show (like in all prior years), it’s necessary to find time and the means to go to all three venues, not to mention somehow keeping in mind what you’ve seen in each to meld it all together. Second, two of the venues have set rather short runs for their parts of the show (Sept. 7-Oct.9 at Opalka and Sept. 10-Oct. 9 at ACG), compared to prior years in which the Regional would typically run for at least two months (which the Airport segment does this year), putting further pressure on the viewer’s resources.

Worse yet, several of the included artists are featured in two locations, and one is in all three, making it even more difficult to absorb and understand their contributions as a whole. (I think all artists would agree that they’d rather not have their work scattered like this.) Even within the venues there are distribution problems. Nearly half the total artists (44 of them) have their works crammed into the confines of ACG, making for a salon-style installation where items are stacked and grouped, and where some individual artists’ have multiple included pieces separated from each other within the room.

While I find all that unfortunate, there’s a lot of energy amid the clutter at ACG, and many intriguing works to be found in the mix there.

In contrast to ACG, the Opalka’s more generous space seems rather sparsely filled. Salisbury selected mostly abstract art, a form I dearly love, but this segment of the show somehow comes off strangely flat. I think this is a consequence of the exhibition being divided – if these mostly worthy works were intermingled in a larger museum space with the other jurors’ choices, it would have created a much more stimulating conversation.

That more appropriate balance seems to have been struck at the Airport – possibly because the juror there is more experienced in putting together large exhibitions for mass consumption in his role as the curator for the Port of Seattle. If only the entire show had been mounted there as it once was, this might have been another great Regional. But that would have been impossible, as the formerly vast space of the airport's third-floor gallery was recently reduced to a much smaller one.

On the plus side, that space is open from 8 am to 10 pm daily, and that segment of the show runs through Nov. 8, so there’s no excuse for missing it.

Viewers peruse a corner of the 2021 Mohawk Hudson Regional at the Airport Gallery

The 43rd Annual Photo Regional: Youth Spotlight

Ally DeRusso - father daughter dance

Publisher’s note: Get Visual has a longstanding policy of not reviewing student work; however, the annual Photography Regional is too important to leave out. My solution for covering this year’s youth-oriented Regional was to invite a highly qualified third party to take up the challenge. I am grateful that Timothy Cahill agreed to provide the following review. –D.B.

By Timothy Cahill

The Opalka Gallery has always been slightly restless around the Photography Regional. The annual gathering of the photographic tribe has become something of a stepchild exhibition, hosted by a number of venues, each of which gives the show its own spin. In 2003, then-Opalka director Jim Richard Wilson organized the Photo Regional as an invitational, transforming what had been an open-call, juried exhibition into a curated one for the first time.

Natalia Gillespie - Abundance

For this year’s iteration of the show, on view at Russell Sage Albany’s Opalka Gallery through April 24, current director Judie Gilmore announced a new innovation: an age restriction. The 43rd Photo Regional:  Showcase on Youth would be limited to artists between the ages of 16 and 26. This ran the risk of producing an exhibition that had the qualities of an end-of-semester display: studious and well-intentioned, derivative and artistically immature. It also offered an opportunity, in the words of the Opalka’s press release, “to celebrate our region’s young photographers and offer them an opportunity to show their work alongside their peers.”

For sure, there are aspects of the exhibition that are earnest and derivative. But, as juried by Khidr Joseph, Jayana LaFountaine, and Anna Schupak, the show does not feel at all unseasoned. In its freshness, intelligence, and diversity, this year’s Photo Regional is hugely satisfying.

I’ve taught photography to undergraduates, and most were, as young people must be, possessed by themselves and their familiar surroundings. This is death to a photographer. Writers are taught to write what they know, but photographers cannot be nearly so interior. They must immerse themselves in what they don’t know - the unknowable realm of otherness that is the visible world. What they discover there becomes the foundation of their art. 

Julia Larberg - Rainbow Self with One Leg Raised

This is an issue in the age of the curated self, social media and the ego-spectacle of the selfie. But, in the hands of a good explorer, even the self can be an undiscovered country, as it is in Julia Larberg’s sunny nude, Rainbow Self with One Leg Raised, or Maggie Lang’s COVID-laden Life Under Quarantine series. I don’t know if the person in Natalia Gillespie’s black-and-white Abundance is the photographer or not, but the field of daisies used as a backdrop wraps the figure in a glorious reverie halo. Jesse Asher Alsdorf, using still life in lieu of portraiture, offers a “discovery in self worth” in his text-and-photo triptych, Bruised Flowers.    

Often, though, when these young artists turn the camera on themselves, their interest is more persona than personal. Ally DeRusso enlists the 20th-century technology of the Polaroid instant camera for her set of five diptychs, casting herself in mini psychodramas narrated by enigmatic titles: smack you in the teeth, father daughter dance, and so on. This is the case too with Madison Scisci’s black-and-white video drama, The Release, in which she films herself in a dual role that leads either to reconciliation or liberation.

Mateo Guevara Lemeland - Neon Boneyard

The woman who Sebenele Ndlangamandla depicts in Float may or may not be the artist herself, but she is clearly playing the part of the goddess. Ndlangamandla’s portrait of a woman embraced by sky and water, gazing pensively out of the frame, is placed between nearly identical images of ripples on a lake or pool, as if she rose from the water there and disappeared again. Like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, this startling woman obviously hails from another realm.

All the photographers in this year’s Regional came of age during the dystopian regime of Donald Trump. In those years, either the past was being rewritten 1984-style by the president’s henchmen, or rendered devoid of any coherent narrative or meaning. Constant exposure to historical gaslighting might have turned these young artists ahistorical, but it hasn’t. If anything, they are the captives of history, of political divisiveness, systemic discrimination, environmental degradation. In response, documentary photography provides some of the show’s most compelling moments.

Catherine Rafferty - A Nation that Forgets

Some of the work is unsettlingly detached. Walker Bankson’s documentary portraits, like his Untitled (Miles Fighting), explore an unsettling banality in contemporary masculinity. The mordant anti-landscapes of John Bonetti (Fountain at the End of the Dam) and Anna Nuler (Ice Cream Castle) reveal the barrenness of the modern built environment. And Mateo Guevara Lemeland’s garishly surreal Relic and Neon Boneyard suggest that the world itself has somehow curdled in place.

Other documents are more visceral. Anna Schupak takes us into the middle of a protest in her Troy series. In a pair of images, Catherine Rafferty juxtaposes the overheated red-white-blue of a Trump rally with the same palette in more somber tones. Her A Nation that Forgets places the blue dress and sandal of a black woman against red paint thrown like blood on the base of a public monument, where the inscription warns, “A Nation That Forgets Its Past Has No Future.” The “white” of the image is represented visually by the paleness of the cement plinth, and conceptually in the photo’s implication of racism.

Rainer Turim - Tompkins Square Park

Inevitably, the artists engage with the natural world. In Rainer Turim’s Tompkins Square Park, a tree growing through a chain-link fence becomes a parable of humanity buckling under nature’s force. Conversely, Gennaro Vargas’ splendid Peruvian Mountains preserves a paradise of human labor in harmony with the earth.

I admit I can make no sense of the arbitrary nature of the exhibition’s 16-26 age range, except to muse, somewhat cynically, that the aim was to attract high schoolers to Sage’s art programs. As it turned out, there is no one under college age in the show, the average age being about 22. (The  only teenager is Xiaoxuan Lisa Li, whose tense, formal manipulations more than hold their own with the older exhibitors’ work.) 

Rather than the weird high-school-to-post-MFA age swing, why not a more traditional “under 30” show, a range that allows for a greater number of mature emerging artists? The three jurors, all of whom are under 26, have given a hybrid feel to the exhibition they organized. While a call for entries opened the show to all, one suspects some of the artists were hand-picked by the jurors from among their friends and colleagues. The final selection feels more curated than the typical juried exhibit. 

Xiaoxuan Lisa Li - Bat I

This hybrid quality is heightened by the inclusion of the jurors’ own work in the exhibit. This is a major departure from prior Regionals, in which the jurors functioned entirely as disinterested umpires, not player-coaches. The show is organized to mitigate the confusion this might cause, with the jurors’ work sequestered in the atrium of the Opalka Gallery, separate from the main body of the show. But it’s unclear how exactly to read this separation: is the juror’s showcase part of the Regional, or an adjunct exhibition?

These are serious questions but, ultimately, they should not detract from the Regional’s comprehensive virtues: its quality, its presentation, and above all its exhilarating diversity. In what has too often been an exhibit of aging white dudes, this year’s 37 artists and 76 artworks provide, in both surname and subject matter, a purposeful look across racial, gender, and geographic boundaries. Yet the jurors’ obvious attention to identity never overwhelms the individual artists’ voices.

Jahniah Kum - Resilience

It is especially thrilling to see the work of so many young black artists on view here: Tyler Ki-Re’s lushly extroverted Unchained; Jahniah Kum’s intimate domestic documents Marz and Resilience; the tender maternal portraits of Jayana LaFountaine’s Postpartum series.

Singularly impressive are the “portraits” of six black sitters in Khidr Joseph’s Make Afros Great Again series.

Joseph gives us the backs of their heads, emphasizing their hair styles, and it’s enough. From this, we get a smart and sensuous alt-MAGA manifesto about black people’s hair and its fraught history of political and social meaning. The centuries of this struggle cannot be separated from the work’s visual beauty. Nevertheless, at a certain point, I surrendered entirely to the artist’s retinal stimulations - the pleasure of the textures revealed by his studio lights, and their kinship to the eros of color, of hair, flesh, fabric, even the chromatic seamless backgrounds. The “anonymity” of the sitters yielded to their uniqueness. The last and highest diversity is the inviolable individual.

Timothy Cahill has reviewed art in the Capital Region since 1995. He has exhibited his photography in the Photo Regional and other group and solo exhibitions. His work is in the collection of the Albany Institute of History & Art.

Khidr Joseph - Make Afros Great Again

Regionals, regionals ...

Juror Karen Davis peruses the Photo Regional Salon at Albany Center Gallery

Thanks in part to the coronavirus pandemic, we now have a perfect storm of regional exhibitions that are all on view simultaneously. With three annual juried shows having been rescheduled, and a new lockdown-themed juried show now open at a prominent college gallery, it’s a boon to regional artists and their fans.

Laura Brodsky's fatherhood 2 won one
of four top prizes at the Photo Regional

First up, the 42nd Annual Photography Regional at Albany Center Gallery began on Sept. 8 with a salon-style installation of 200-plus submissions by more than 80 photographers. Karen Davis, co-owner of Davis-Orton Gallery in Hudson, then culled those submissions into a Select show that re-opened on Sept 18. It features 43 photographers (of which I am one) and includes 49 pieces, with 11 of those works receiving special recognition. Heads-up: The Photo Regional will close this Friday (Oct. 2), so you’ll have to hurry if you want to take a look. I recommend that you do.

Jill Baucom's Blackberries won one of
four top prizes in the Photo Regional

Also recently opened, on Sept. 19 (through Jan. 3, 2021), is the 2020 Exhibition by Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region (aka the Regional), which is the most significant show in the annual calendar locally and, now in its 84th year, one of the longest-standing shows of its kind in the nation. The Regional rotates among three venues, and is hosted this year by the Albany Institute of History & Art, which tapped MASS MoCA Senior Curator Susan Cross as juror. In keeping with Regional tradition, an accompanying catalog with an essay by Cross is planned by the Institute and will be available in a few weeks.

Amy Silberkleit - 1918 stone lithograph

Perhaps due to Cross’s high profile as a curator in the region, the show attracted more than 700 entries by nearly 250 artists across all media. Cross whittled these down to 108 works by 73 artists (of which – you guessed it – I am one), also selecting 19 among them for special awards that range from $1,000 cash to $100 gift certificates. She then planned the installation of the show in five contiguous spaces within the museum, using the variously sized galleries as venues for thematic groupings.

Deborah Zlotsky - Yours, Mine, Ours
vintage scarves

The largest of those galleries contains vast splashes of bright colors provided by works in many media – painting, sculpture, photography, collage, and textiles among them – with a large portion of those pieces being abstract. In a nearby, somewhat smaller room, again featuring the full array of media, the theme is landscape.

Yet another medium-sized gallery includes works that mostly engage in political or social commentary, again with many media represented but, in this case, weighted much more toward photography (not including my own, which are abstract, and hang in the larger gallery).

One feels the effects of 2020’s global and national upheavals in Cross’s selection of prizes, many of which went to the more topical works in the show, yet the overall effect of this Regional is what it should be: a well-distributed cross-section of the region’s best art, organized - but not dominated - by theme.

Jeff Wigman's oil on panel Arrival in Hell is included in Infinite Uncertainty.
Wigman also has work in the Mohawk-Hudson Regional and the Fence Salon.

Fortunately, another local gallery took up that thematic challenge by specifically requesting topical work for an open-call show juried by Sharon Bates, Stacey Robinson, Ellen Letcher and Julie Torres. Infinite Uncertainty opened at Sage College of Albany’s Opalka Gallery on Sept. 1 and includes approximately 100 works selected from over 250 total submissions. It closes on Oct. 10 so, again, you’ll have to hurry if you want to see it - and I recommend that you do.

It’s worth noting that seven of the 33 regional artists included in Infinite Uncertainty are also included in the Mohawk-Hudson Regional (in which four of them received awards), an overlap that underscores the meaningful relationship between the two shows. Like the Regional, Infinite Uncertainty features work across many media, a good bit of it colorfully or monochromatically abstract, but much more of it representing interpretive responses to our current social issues.

Tatana Kellner - Scream
collage, acrylic, and charcoal on paper

Each artist’s work is accompanied by statements that explain the impetus for the selected pieces, ranging from technical adaptation to using available quotidian materials during art-supply-chain shutdowns to direct commentaries on hot topics like the pandemic and BLM protests. The writings provide a telling window into the interior lives of artists, and make a strong statement about both their resilience and the power of art to buoy the human spirit in hard times.

Altogether, Infinite Uncertainty is a relatively rare instance of a carefully curated large group show at an urban Capital Region gallery featuring only regional artists. Though 33 seems like a lot of participants, the spacious gallery has enough room to accommodate multiple pieces by most of them, and numerous pieces by many, making for a great degree of depth in this presentation.

This mixed-media collage by Paula
Drysdale Frazell is in the Fence Salon

Finally, the Fence Salon show opened on Sept. 11 at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy and will remain on view there through Nov. 7, after which it will be rehung as the Fence Select, which will be juried by Tang Museum Director Ian Berry. Please note that the Arts Center is operating on a modified schedule – open Tuesday to Thursday, 10 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. or by appointment.

Here, too, there is significant overlap with artists who are also in the Mohawk-Hudson Regional (I counted nine), which comes as no surprise considering the prestige of the juror and the longstanding tradition of this show, which I have often referred to as “the other Regional.” There’s also some artist overlap between Fence and the Opalka show, as well as between Fence and the Photo-Regional. I can only begin to imagine the thought processes that went on with these artists as they tried to determine which works to submit where. 

I will revisit the Fence show on this blog after it has been juried and re-hung as Fence Select.

In the meantime, please do yourself a favor and get out to see these treasure troves of high-quality, current regional art while you can.

Mike Glier's oil on canvas Swallows Hunting is part of the Mohawk-Hudson Regional.
Glier is one of three former Regional jurors who have work in this year's show.

Fence Select 19 at ACCR

Installation view of Fence Select 19 at the Arts Center of the Capital Region

Each year in the Capital Region two big shows provide an opportunity for local artists to expose their latest work and for art fans to see a broad range of what the regional scene has to offer. Those two shows are the Mohawk-Hudson Regional, which rotates venues, and The Fence Show, hosted annually by the Arts Center of the Capital Region (ACCR) in Troy. Each show serves these purposes in contrasting ways.

The current edition of Fence Select (a curated selection of 62 pieces pulled from the 400+ works submitted to the all-inclusive, salon-style Fence Show) has a quite a few of the same artists you might find in a typical Regional - but that's where the similarity begins to fade. Most notably, Fence lacks gravitas - it's casual. The artworks are arrayed in straight lines, but with little apparent relationship among them (see example in view shown above). It's possible that this quirky arrangement was done in homage to the Fence Show's origins - it began several decades ago with the artworks being hung from the spikes of an iron fence that surrounds Troy's Washington Park, where the ACCR was located at the time.

Jeff Wigman - Pug Chihuahua Mix, oil on paper (detail)

Also quirky: Several of the included artists (juried by Art Omi Curator Nicole Hayes) had two pieces chosen, but none of those pairs are hung together. Meanwhile, somewhat counter-intuitively, all but two of the prizes went to artists who had just one piece chosen (the exceptions being Runner-Up Jeff Wigman and Honorable Mention Catherine Austin).

On the plus side, those prizes were numerous and rich - a total of about $3,000 was awarded to 11 recipients, including a Student Best in Show and a Student Runner-Up, who received $100 each. That kind of encouragement to young (or, for that matter, established) artists is invaluable.

Then there's the numbering system. Rather than re-number the works after re-hanging them from the Salon installation, the ACCR has retained each piece's original submission number, making for a whacked-out game of seek and find when attempting to locate works by referring to the numerically ordered checklist. Additionally, at the time of my visit, the checklist was missing five of the selected pieces altogether, so I couldn't even identify those artists or their works' titles (hopefully, that's been rectified).

As is usual with a juried show, there are a few odd choices here, including several that are - forgive me - plain awful or, at best, pedestrian. It seems Hayes has curious taste. I'll leave it for you to decide which may be the weaker players, but let's just agree to accept the show as a bit underwhelming overall and move on to the highlights.

Lori Lawrence - In the Light, oil on canvas

Among my favorite pieces in this selection are non-prizewinners by artists I've known for a long time. Lori Lawrence, emerging from a prolonged hiatus, has two particularly strong paintings of natural scenes with gloriously unnatural coloration. Also glorying in unbridled color sense is a large painting on paper by Wendy Williams that, wisely, was given pride of place at the start of the exhibition. I also discovered a few new names worth keeping an eye out for, including Janet Barnett, whose delicate, pedestal-scale wood sculpture entitled Autumn Wind captures movement remarkably well; and Aindrea Richard, whose mystically complex and adroitly painted untitled gouache received an Honorable Mention from the juror.

Mary LaFleur - ceramic

Other prizewinners include Jamie Rodriguez (Best in Show), whose amusingly titled combination of painting and sculpture stretches boundaries of medium, expression, and - possibly - decorum (see image at bottom of this post); Catherine Austin, who makes drawings from old Polaroids (I think); and Mary LaFleur, who received a staff award for her expressive ceramic horse (shown at left).

The show has a fairly small selection of photographs (most of which, regrettably, are forgettable) but three stood out to me: Chris Demarco's study of a kudzu infestation; Theresa Swidorski's negative image of a forest; and Robert Coppola's color picture of a tiny house in Maine.

Fence Select will remain on view through July 7. Also on view in the ACCR's Foyer Gallery is a crowd-pleasing collection of works on paper by Mary Sherwood entitled Drawing on Experience, which will remain there through Sept 6. An artists' reception for both exhibitions will be held Friday, June 28, from 6-8 p.m as part of the monthly Troy Night Out events.

Also of interest in Troy is a retrospective exhibition of photographs by Eric Lindbloom, extended through June 30 at the PhotoCenter (example at right, above). Fans of traditional black-and-white photography will be thrilled by the craftsmanship and ethereal quality of Lindbloom's masterful work.

Jamie Rodriguez - It's unfortunate what happened to Peter Stuyvesant and his peg leg, mixed media (detail)

Photography Regional 41 at Collar Works

Jeff Lansing - Albany Warehouse District 1 (with text added by Collar Works)

Every Photography Regional is unique, but the 41st edition of this popular and often controversial annual is even more different than most, due to a new venue and particularly tight jurying.

This year, the peripatetic show has found a Troy home at Collar Works, a raw and ample nonprofit space that opened for business a little over three years ago under the guidance of Executive Director Elizabeth Dubben, and quickly made a name for itself as an innovative hub of the local contemporary arts scene.

Justin Baker - Frodo's Ghost II

Historically, the Photo Regional has always rotated among sponsoring organizations. When it began in 1979, responsibility for it was shared between Albany Center Gallery and the former Rensselaer County Council for the Arts (RCCA) in Troy. After RCCA (now known as the Arts Center of the Capital Region) bowed out in the mid-'90s, other venues took up the cause, including Fulton Street Gallery and the PhotoCenter in Troy, and the Albany Airport Gallery in Colonie. Albany Center Gallery has continued to be in the mix since it first hosted in 1980; Sage College of Albany's Opalka Gallery has held the show every three years since 2003; and now there's Collar Works, which I hope will remain as a regular host in the cycles to come.

Natasha Holmes - Babble, Bubble

Regular followers of the Photo Regional will be struck by how different in scope the current iteration is from the previous 40: With only 18 works by 15 artists, it's by far the sparest version ever. The only comparison I can make would be to the 2003 Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region Juried Exhibition at UAlbany's Art Museum, which had just 17 artists and 35 works in it (trivia buffs may note that one artist, Justin Baker, was selected for both). Typically, either of these Regionals will include far more work (for example, two years ago at ACG, the 39th Photo Regional included 72 pieces by 51 artists).

That said, whereas the 2003 Mohawk-Hudson Regional was overwhelmed by the UAlbany Museum's vast, two-story space, Photo Regional 41 sits fairly comfortably in the low-ceilinged Collar Works gallery. On my first visit, having heard about the small number of works included, I doubted they could hold the space - but I found that dividing walls, along with sensible pairings and groupings of related pieces, have given the minimal selection enough support to stand up.

Theresa Swidorski - Forest Gate

Chosen by Brooklyn-based curators Kathleen Vance and Daniel Ayecock from submissions by 88 artists, the show hews to the traditional; few of the images deviate very far from the camera-made, though the collection feels contemporary in style, subject, and coloration. Only three of the 18 pieces are monochromatic and, of those, just one is black and white (the other two being a cyanotype, which is blue, and a digitally-reproduced toned darkroom print in a range of dark browns). Overall, the technical and visual quality of the images is high but, as with all such shows, there are a few clunkers (I'll leave it to the readers to see the show and decide for themselves which ones those may be).

Coby Berger - Albany Super Storage

Another distinction of this Regional is that, though it was juried from an open call (i.e. not an invitational), no prizes were awarded, apart from the jurors' decision to give the "top three" among the accepted artists two pictures in the show, while the other 12 selected artists have one picture each. Those three - Justin Baker, Chris DeMarco, and Jeff Lansing - are all worthy of the distinction, and the pairs of pictures included by each make strong presentations.

With so many variations on the usual theme, this Photo Regional provides a lot of food for thought. Is it better to see more or fewer artists in a large group show? Does seeing two or three of an individual artist's pieces help you understand and appreciate their work better, or could more time spent with just one piece provide greater insight? Can 18 artists adequately represent a region? For that matter, can any show represent a region at all?

Chris DeMarco - Test Site 2

As in most Regionals, this show includes a number of familiar names as well as a few new ones. In addition to the jurors' top three choices, I particularly liked George Guarino's geometric and heavily textured digital photo assemblage titled Daughter Mother; Natasha Holmes's Babble, Bubble, a fun-filled concoction of commonplace objects; Robert Coppola's colorful bit of Americana from Santa Cruz, Calif.; Theresa Swidorski's spooky reverse-printed Forest Gate; and Coby Berger's painterly urban study Albany Super Storage.

Other work that caught my eye included unrelated mist-shrouded night scenes by William Gill and Christopher Herrera, and a quiet suburban scene by Monica Hamilton. The other artists included in the show are Kieran Barber, Hannah Alsdorf, Scott Keidong, and Hillary Raimo. It's worth noting that Hamilton and Barber are both college students (at Skidmore and Saint Rose, respectively), showing that even a very tightly juried show can offer first-time professional opportunities for up-and-comers. That kind of openness is one of the things that makes an annual Regional like this both popular and vital to the community.

Photography Regional 41 runs through April 27. Please note, Collar Works has limited hours: 12 to 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday, and 12 to 4 p.m. Saturday.

Monica Hamilton - Layers of Green, Layers of Wheels, Leadville, Colorado

2018 Exhibition by Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region at UAlbany Art Museum

Matt Frieburghaus - Water Collection, still image from four-minute video

The current edition of the annual Exhibition by Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region (aka the Regional) opened recently at UAlbany’s University Art Museum, and it is subtly strong. Selected by the installation artist Jean Shin from more than 1,500 submitted works, the show is spare and surprisingly tame – apart from a couple of challenging videos and VR treats, you might believe you were viewing art from two or three decades ago.

But don’t take that the wrong way – Shin’s choices are almost flawless in terms of quality; maybe this snapshot of 2018 simply says that artists today are looking forward by looking back. I for one will never tire of painterly abstraction – and here’s a ton of it! Indeed, this Regional is almost a show of paintings, with a few photographs, sculptures, prints and drawings thrown in for balance.

Shari Mendelson - Korean Bird Vessel 2
repurposed plastic and other media

Looking closer, it’s a tight selection for the fairly vast space – just 78 works by 38 artists – organized into affinity groupings that provide most of the pieces with very good company. Longtime fans of the event will recognize plenty of names, such as Susan Spencer Crowe, Stephen Niccolls, and Deborah Zlotsky, but will also be exposed to a number of new ones. Among those, I was intrigued by Beth Humphrey's petite, colorful, cut-paper collages, which float off the wall as lightly as flower petals or insect wings, and by Shari Mendelson's neo-ancient artifacts of the plastic age, which I like for their sly sense of humor and wan coloration.

Gina Occhiogrosso - A Cold Melt
acrylic ink and oil on muslin

Top prize went to Gina Occhiogrosso, a SUNY New Paltz alumna and College of Saint Rose professor who has been showing a lot  in the top local venues (e.g. Albany Airport Gallery, Albany Center Gallery) and who seems to have suddenly come into her own. The two large paintings on pieced muslin that she presents here are well worthy of the award.

Nearby are several of the show’s three-dimensional works, including David Herbert's  monumental take on the Statue of Liberty. Topical and laboriously hand-wrought of wood and string, its emptiness speaks volumes. Also topical are Susan Hoffer’s three modestly sized representational paintings of people looking at electronic screens. Her titles are ironically compelling (one is Watching Human Rights Silently Legislated Away) and her technique is both luminescent and a bit goopy, creating an odd surface tension that adds to her wry message.

Karin Schaefer - Intersectional, oil on canvas

Most of the other paintings in the show, including Karin Schaefer’s studies in blue, two beauties by Niccolls, and Zlotsky's three quasi-Constructivist pieces, along with works by Victoria Palermo, Gerald Wolfe, Claire Stankus, and Rick Briggs, are more about the color itself – but, again, that’s all right with me. Meanwhile, even some of the photographs in the show, such as Justin Baker's and Ray Felix's, are studies in color abstraction, as are Crowe's brilliant cut and folded wall reliefs.

A particular favorite piece of mine (and winner of both a Juror's Award and a purchase prize) is Laura Frare and Mary Kathryn Jablonski’s video-poetry collaboration, entitled These Last Few Days of Freezing Rains. It runs an acceptable 4 minutes, and creates a wintry atmosphere by combining visuals and images evoked by spoken words. Be sure not to miss seeing/hearing it from the start, as it cycles continuously.

David Herbert
The Phantom of Liberty
wood, string, paint, hardware

Another innovative video in the show, by Matt Frieburghaus, appears to be an animated Marcus Uzilevsky (remember the cloyingly popular 1980s artist of the linear landscapes?). I know Frieburghaus derives landscape images of water, mountains, and icebergs directly from nature, so perhaps he’s adapted one of his originals into this form as a tongue-in-cheek homage to the other artist - or else he took an actual Uzilevsky and animated it. In any case, it held my attention for a good while.

Similarly mesmerizing are the two VR (virtual reality) works presented by Jessica Ann Willis that each provide a kaleidoscopic experience in an illusory cube of space. On the wall nearby are two exquisite mandala-like paintings by Amy Cheng, and two similarly radiating rag-rug assemblages by Kathy Greenwood - yet more non-representational work in the show.

Susan Spencer Crowe - Tosca
cut and folded paper, graphite, Flashe

A few other sculptures expand the show's range - including a big inflatable car by Greg Skochko, cleverly jigsawed vintage doors by Amelia Toelke, jewel-like colored acrylic in Susan Meyer's constructions - as do photographs by Martin Benjamin, Sean Hovendick, and Monica d. Church that compassionately depict people. But, overall, the paintings clearly dominate this Regional.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition clearly demonstrates just how high a standard is maintained by the fine artists in this region, and provides plenty of food for thought on the questions of what defines a region and what defines a moment in time.

Note: This year's Regional is accompanied by a sidebar exhibition in the Museum's attached upstairs West gallery. Entitled Flow, it includes one or two pieces each by 11 UAlbany alumni whose works  received UAlbany purchase prizes during the past nine Regionals, and covers a full range of artistic media. Both shows continue through Dec. 8.

Susan Hoffer - Appealing to a Moral World Community, oil on hardwood

Photography Regional - HIJACKED!

Sarah Sweeney - Five Down at Jokulsarlon 2015

The 40th Annual Photography Regional, which recently opened at Sage College of Albany's Opalka Gallery, is quite unlike any of the 39 that came before it. Many will be displeased by Opalka director Judie Gilmore's decision to present the show as an invitational, rather than as a juried show that all can enter, though that is the format employed thrice before by the Opalka (in 2006, 2009, and 2012), and once in 1995 by then co-sponsor Rensselaer County Council for the Arts (now known as the Arts Center of the Capital Region and no longer a sponsor of the Photo Regional).

There's a lot of history behind this circumstance, and a lot of passion among the people who have participated in this show over the decades. I'm one of those people - for the record, I was included in the first 12 Photo Regionals, and then participated off and on until about ten years ago, when I gave up exhibiting my work altogether. During that time I was honored with a number of juror's awards, and I was included in the 1995 and 2006 invitationals (so there's no sour grapes here). I also have had a certain amount of input into the planning of the show, including having helped decide who would judge it on a few occasions, both as a volunteer and as longtime exhibits chair for Albany Center Gallery, the only original sponsor still in the hosting rotation.

This puts me in the company of quite a few other regional photographers - the show has always been driven by volunteers and grass roots organizations, and it has always existed in the spirit of serving the wants and needs of the regional photography community by providing a showcase, critical input from an outside juror, almost always a public presentation by the juror, and a chance for everyone to come together once a year and take stock.

This year's guest curator Tim Davis, a prominent photographer and Bard College professor, has provided just one of those benefits: His talk at the Opalka on the evening before the show's official opening was first-rate, and certainly the only one in these 40 years in which the guest speaker accompanied himself on guitar while singing original songs while his images shuffled past (delightfully rhyming "setting Southern sun" with "William Eggleston"). Davis showed three recent bodies of work, all of them excellent, and variously spoke, sang and played, and read a long Beat-inspired essay. He earned many rounds of applause during the presentation.

But Davis is a much better artist than he is a curator. The show, which includes 16 bodies of work by 17 artists (two being collaborators), has no center. If it does have a theme, it would be the phenomenon I like to call "too-muchness," which is relevant both to our time in general and to the dilemma currently facing serious photographers, who must compete with every iPhone and Droid on earth - and the billions of pictures they generate every day - for the viewer's attention.

Tim Davis - El Pollo Loco

Davis's own work deals quite beautifully with our overabundance of visual stimuli, particularly in a group of pictures he showed that were shot in an unstructured swoon during a sabbatical in Los Angeles (see an example at right); some of the people he included in the show do similarly, though not as well as Davis does, in my opinion. However, I digress. What is it about this show that makes it wrong as a Photo Regional?

First, it fails to represent any meaningful concept of the region. Though the various entities that have sponsored the show over the decades were not consistent in defining a geography for the show (apparently having set its geographic limit variously between a 75-mile and a 150-mile radius of the Capital Region), this overly personal selection simply squashes the geography into the mid-Hudson Valley (where Davis resides), while also including one photographer from a rural location near Oneonta, one from Saratoga Springs, one from Florence, Mass., and a collaborating pair from Rochester (which is over 200 miles from Albany). The one person included who has a residence in the Capital District (Averill Park) is a special case: Phyllis Galembo, as the winner of the first Photography Regional's top prize in 1979 - and a past juror - provides a vital link to the show's history. But these facts stand in stark contrast to the randomness of the rest of the current edition's content.

Whereas the past Invitationals were drawn from photographers who regularly show in or near the Capital Region and who, in most cases, would probably have submitted to the show in a juried format, that is not the situation here - most of these photographers are represented by galleries in major cities and, therefore, would have no interest in participating in a juried regional (notably, Galembo never submitted again after that first year). Both the first Photo Regional Invitational held at the RCCA in 1995 and the second one, organized by the Opalka's late director Jim Richard Wilson in 2006, specifically drew their selections entirely from prior Photo Regional prize winners.

Sharon Core Unititled #17 2017

Opalka Exhibition Coordinator Amy Griffin said, "as a regional photographer myself, I'm happy to have discovered some photographers I was not aware of before and I would hope other photographers would feel the same." I agree, in principle - but does that justify displacing the Regional itself? Further, this is just one of several current opportunities to see really high-level photography in nearby galleries, including a massive joint presentation of 12 major international photographers at Colgate University, Hamilton University, Skidmore's Tang Teaching Museum (through April 22) and Albany's University Art Museum (through April 7). Entitled This Place, the show focuses on Israel's West Bank; for more details, click here. There's also a solo exhibition by Daesha Devon Harris, the top prize-winner in 2015's Photo Regional, at the Lake George Arts Project's Courthouse Gallery (through April 13); and two of the six artists featured in Albany Center Gallery's current Mohawk-Hudson Regional Invitational are photographers.

Griffin also said that her husband, Danny Goodwin, who (along with Tara Fracalossi) juried last year's Photo Regional at Albany Center Gallery, pointed out to her that he was not pleased to see that some people submitted older or oft-shown work (a phenomenon that no doubt crops up at most juried annuals), which she cited as another reason to curate the show this time rather than to invite open submissions. But that's a really easy fix - the juror(s) can simply omit any submitted work they find to be stale.

Ironically, this iteration of the show turns out to be stuffed with stale work. Based on the exhibition checklist, most of it dates to 2015 or even earlier, such as Chad Kleitsch's two large prints from 2010 and Polly Apfelbaum's whole collection from 2012. Only one artist in the show, Saskia Baden, offers an entirely fresh body of work - 14 gelatin-silver prints dated 2017 - and she's a kid who just graduated from Bard. C'mon people, you're supposed to be professionals - you're going to let a rookie show you how to produce? Well, good for Baden - even if she is Davis's star student, he had every reason to count her in, because those 14 pieces are really wonderful. And, wait - did I say gelatin silver prints? Yeaaaah, baby.

Ultimately, The 40th Annual Photography Regional, which is subtitled Effects That Aren't Special and runs through April 21, will provide to the community the same vital service as its 39 predecessors: Stimulating people in the community to talk about the medium they adore so passionately, and causing all of us to seek ways to keep the show relevant and effective for 40 more years. The discussion has been going on for a long time, and it will continue.

I hope you, dear reader, will add to that discussion. Please visit the Opalka and join the conversation by posting a comment here, or talk about it with others who love photography. And, remember - as ever, it's still our show.

Justin Kimball - Liberty Street 2014

Paul Mauren at Albany Center Gallery

The local art mafia came out in force last Friday night for Paul Mauren's exhibition Where Things Go at Albany Center Gallery, and with good reason. Yes, many of the seeming hundreds of guests were this longtime College of Saint Rose professor's colleagues, counterparts, current and former students, friends and fans, but the show alone is an event worthy of major excitement.

Paul Mauren - Speak to Me 2016, assembled mixed materials

Mauren, a stalwart of the regional arts scene (and beyond) for several decades, has operated under the radar for the most part. Still, he has built up a presence through steady inclusion in important shows - going back to the 1979 Mohawk Hudson Regional, a 1981 solo at Emma Willard's Dietel Gallery, and the seminal Water Works exhibition, held in 1982 in an Albany public bath house that eventually met the wrecker's ball.

More recently, Mauren has been featured prominently in numerous Regionals, in the striking An Armory Show at Sage's Opalka Gallery, and in countless annual and biennial Saint Rose faculty shows. Almost as consistently, though, Mauren has shown at ACG.

A few of those highlights:

• Mauren was chosen for two Mohawk Hudson Regional Invitationals at ACG - the first in 1994, when Les Urbach still ran the show there, the last in 2005, with Sarah Martinez at the helm
• In 2007, Mauren was included in the first show at ACG's current space - titled Then and Now, it featured a who's who of local artists, from David Austin to Deborah Zlotsky
• And now this, his first solo exhibition in nearly 35 years, which fits the space like a glove

It is truly fitting that such an artist would provide bookends to the 10-year Columbia Street run of this beloved institution, and help send it on its way to its next space, just two blocks away, in the freshly renovated Arcade Building, where it is slated to reopen in January.

Where Things Go runs through Nov. 4 (and there will be an artist talk at the gallery on that last evening during 1st Friday). Full disclosure - it was my idea to invite Mauren to do this show, simply because I wanted to see more of his intriguing, wall-hung sculpture. And I am not disappointed. But don't take my word for it - just go and be dazzled.

Paul Mauren works on the installation of Where Things Go at Albany Center Gallery