Puzzled: Ryan Parr at Yates Gallery

Sunflower Remix Reprise 2016 - oil on canvas 51 x 51 inches

One of the hidden gems on the local art scene is the Yates Gallery at Siena College. Tucked into the second floor of the college's Standish Library, the Yates offers modestly scaled exhibitions in a quiet, well-lit space perfectly suited to the solo shows by emerging artists that it tends to favor.

The current show on view there (through May 14), entitled Puzzled, features 12 paintings and four drawings by Ryan Parr, a native of Iowa and UAlbany 2005 MFA recipient who, like so many of his fellows, has stuck around after graduation to become a regular part of the region's rich mix of artists. This is his first solo exhibition in the Northeast.

El Guggen Remix 2008 - oil on canvas
72 x 48 inches

I had previously thought of Parr as a photorealist or realist painter, but the range of techniques in this show clearly demonstrates he can't be so simply labeled. The 16 pieces all depict the titular puzzles - most of them in overall, nearly planar compositions - and hang together as a nice, tight group, but they also reveal a subtle diversity of styles and influences that I found quite pleasantly entertaining.

In a short statement that accompanies the show, Parr says, "I use drawings and photographs to develop elaborate compositions, and methodically paint them. ... I aspire to have each painting materialize in a different way." Parr also evokes in the statement his love of painting, with references to surface, marks, and brushstrokes. These elements all prove significant as one peruses the work.

Kiss Remix Reprise 2017 - oil on canvas
43 x 26 inches

While some artists play games that can be off-putting, Parr's sincerity is infectious, even while he plays. First, he emulates the representational techniques that led me to pigeonhole him as a realist; next, he puts out a masterly homage to the painterly pop of Jasper Johns; and then, he swings off into Cubist territory for a painting or two. All the while, the subject remains jigsaw puzzles, filtered through the lens of art history, but with a lighthearted humor that leaves academia far in the background. It's really good fun.

Just one thing had me a bit puzzled. The inclusion of two paintings that depict the jigsaw pieces in plastic zip bags, which transformed them from flat, illusionistic (even nearly abstract) images into more physical objects seemed a touch jarring. One of the two then adds a perplexing second jigsaw design that overlays the bag of pieces, reasserting the picture plane. As both of these are among the latest paintings in the show, I take them as a new direction that perhaps will make more sense as time goes on.

The nice thing about a good, mid-sized show like this is that it gives the viewer a chance to see enough of an artist's work to get a broad perspective and, as in this instance, sense the artist's trajectory through time. Based on the body of work shown here, it looks like Parr is on a good roll.

Map on Puzzle on White 2013 - oil on canvas 43 x 70 inches

Carrie Will: I Am Redundant

The photographer Carrie Will has made her presence known in recent years with pictures in several regional juried shows - now a solo exhibition at Siena College’s Yates Gallery offers the first local opportunity to look at a full body of her work. Presented in a diaristic mode, I Am Redundant includes 13 medium-sized color prints, all of which are double self-portraits. That is, Will is an identical twin, and the portraits are of her sister and herself (you can see her portfolio by clicking here).

Tagged with the quote “I am redundant, half of a whole, a freak, identical and lucky,” the collection belies this statement by demonstrating (perhaps without intending to) that the two sisters are in fact not quite physically identical, and that each has a distinctly different personal presence.

This contrast is most apparent in the image titled Williamsburg, where the two sit in a gritty outdoor part of New York City, facing the camera. Rikki, the darker sister identifiable from the show’s first picture, which sorts them out by shirt color, slumps miserably, while the brighter Carrie holds herself up firmly and optimistically.

These pictures may be total fictions – it’s hard to tell. Do the young women come from a privileged home (like Tina barney, a photographer this work recalls), or are images such as the one taken in a sumptuous and multi-arched “Dining Room” made in other people’s spaces? It doesn’t really matter – these are the kinds of questions the genre prefers to ask rather than answer.

What appears to be real, however, is the intense relationship between the two sisters. In several of the pictures, they are locked in an intense embrace. One wonders whether Rikki is also an artist; or if Carrie, who is an artist, is actually the better adjusted twin. Is she supporting the emotional struggles of the seemingly troubled Rikki?

I’ve never been a big fan of the storytelling, girls-playing-dress-up style of photography that has been so popular since Cindy Sherman's heyday, but Will brings a deft touch to the category with her refined sense of color and form, and her understated ironies.

Please forgive the late notice, as there is only about a week left to see this show – it ends on March 4 - but it's worth a look if you can fit it in.

Rating: Recommended

"The Reality Show" at Siena College

Crape Myrtle - oil on canvas by Chris Murray

Two artists who favor realism are paired for a showcase at Siena College's Yates Gallery through April 30th. The Reality Show: Works by Chris Murray and Jon Gernon doesn't break any new ground, but it is a tidy little concentration of work by two artists who have been deservedly gaining increasing exposure on the local scene.

Not entirely coincidentally, Gernon is the curator of Clement Art Gallery in Troy, where Yates Gallery curator Sergio Sericolo is currently featured in a fine two-person show with Wendy Ide Williams. Yes, it's a smallish community of artists and curators who mostly know each other, but that can be true in very big cities, as well, and is entirely natural. Who else are they supposed to hang out with?

Gernon is a good, old-fashioned drawer and painter, and the show presents a total of eight of his pieces: five in graphite, one in primary pastels, and two in full-color egg tempera. All play visual, symbolic, and spatial games, such as Bowl of Cherries, a drawing that renders the titular bowl in sharp black and white, with a trompe l'oeil print of a bird hanging behind it, such that the bird appears to be perched on a cherry stem.

The pastel, a study for a painting, prominently features a yellow rubber duck and a snippet of a Mondrian picture (misidentified as a Morandi) in a clear bit of red-yellow-blue playfulness. One of the two tempera paintings plays a similar game with trompe l'oeil crayons in blue, yellow and green (with a title that makes reference to color mixing - and shown at right).

My favorite piece by Gernon in the show is a 2009 egg tempera titled Still Life with Botticelli, where odds and ends of the Italian artist's works are represented by pencil sketches on Post-Its and a color postcard, which, along with several colorful crayons, are masking-taped to a tall, narrow, white-painted board. Except they're not - it's all painted in trompe l'oeil again.

Murray is also a very skilled painter who likes to fool the eye, by imitating the look of a color photograph (right down to the out-of-focus areas) while maintaining a great degree of painterly effects, visible if you study them closely enough. His five pieces in the show are inconsistent in style, which would be a serious problem in a bigger or more prominent show, where you would need to clearly see and understand the vision of the artist.

In this case, a sampler is OK, as the quality of the work is so high that each painting can stand alone. Two of them depict flowering trees, but in contrasting ways. The hexagonal arrangement of a big blossom in the 4-foot-square Crape Myrtle (shown at top of post) is really a straightforward depiction of its subject - but a similarly sized vertical painting titled Blossoms, realistic in its way, does far more to transform the subject into something we wouldn't otherwise see. It is cropped, abstracted, almost liquefied, and therefore more successful as a work of art.

The other Murray painting in this selection that holds our attention is a 2-by-3-foot portrait of the artist Robert Gullie. Searing in its Chuck Close-like details of whiskers and veins, it is also masterfully smooth in its color selections and transitions. Beyond that, it is a portrait in the real sense: Gullie's clear blue eyes gaze out at us, and his penetrating expression draws us in.

There will be an artists lecture and reception for The Reality Show on Thursday, April 15; the talk is from 4:00-4:30 p.m. in the library basement, room L26, and the reception will follow in the gallery on the second floor, ending at 6 p.m.

Photo Show Alert

Boy Elvis - Graceland photograph by Marla Sweeney at NYSM

Here's a quick heads-up for photography fans: There are a number of important photo shows going on in the immediate Capital Region that I haven't yet had a chance to mention. One has an event today (Thursday, Feb. 11), another opens tomorrow, and a third will run just 10 more days, so you gotta hurry if you want to see it.

In order of imminence:

• Martin Benjamin's retrospective solo show titled Atomic Age at the Yates Gallery of Siena College in Loudonville has a reception today, preceded by a slide talk. Benjamin will speak in the Standish Library's lower level lecture hall L26 from 4 to 4:30 p.m.; a reception for the show will follow in the gallery upstairs, along with a signing for Benjamin's new book titled Atomic Age, and will go till 6. The show opened on Jan. 28 and will remain on view through Mar. 12 during library hours (which are pretty extensive).

• Opening tomorrow (Friday, Feb. 12) without fanfare will be the latest installment in the Bank of America Great Art Series at the New York State Museum. Seeing Ourselves: Masterpieces of American Photography from the George Eastman House Collection is a very personalized selection of images, by those both famous and not, drawn from an archive so huge there are even two of MY pictures in it (no, they're not in the show - but they might have been). A not-so-famous example is shown above; some of the better known names in the show include Ansel Adams, Lewis Hine, and Dorothea Lange. The show will run through May 9.

• A solo retrospective by Dan McCormack titled Varied Projects opened on Jan. 8 at the Photography Center of the Capital District in Troy and covers more than two decades of work too diverse and original to be categorized. It runs through Feb. 21. A complete review of this show will be posted here by the start of the weekend - so please check back. Meanwhile, take note that the PhotoCenter's hours are a bit quirky: 5–9 p.m. Monday,Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; and noon–6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.