"It's The Thread That Binds" at Albany Center Gallery

We used to think that fine art means oil paintings, cast-bronze sculptures, and maybe a nice charcoal drawing or limited-edition print - but times have changed, and even conservative thinkers recognize that media once reserved for the trades, such as glass and wood, or materials previously unassociated with creativity, such as found objects or Mylar-wrapped candies, are also acceptable as the stuff that museums compete to show and collect.

It's The Thread That Binds, an exhibition of work by newcomers Sierra Furtwangler and Jennifer Hunold at Albany Center Gallery, has paired two fiber artists who play at opposite ends of the art-craft-nostalgia continuum that characterizes the current interaction of postmodern thought with folksy materials. On one hand, we have the 21st-century musings of house-hunter Hunold, who expresses herself humbly in the 17th-century media of embroidery and cross-stitch; on the other hand, there are Furtwangler's oversized stuffed animals, charmingly and naively sewn, but with fangs and breasts and genitals flamboyantly displayed.

Hunold presents two series - colorful thread embroideries of "dream house" floor plans, and cross-stitched aphorisms coded to current moral issues - along with a few related odds and ends. Her obsession with the ideal home is a fairly universal one, but the variations she offers do little to transcend the banality of that American dream. When she lets herself go a bit, whether through fanciful patterns or a slightly edgier concept, Hunold starts to become engaging.

But the cross-stitched pieces, while trying to amuse, are cute at best, and overall really cloying. For example, the one titled Soap + H20 = Nice has no irony or humor - it actually serves specifically to tell us that it's nice to be clean. Another lampoons annoying drivers who honk too loudly when we don't jump off the line at a freshly turned green light. A light tap will do, Hunold sweetly scolds.

These pieces underline the bland sincerity of Hunold's domestic dreaming, which leaves much to be desired. Were she to aim her medium toward subverting our perceptions of embroidered mottoes and samplers by sending stronger messages of our times, Hunold might begin to get somewhere interesting.

Fortunately, Furtwangler has no such timidity. Her sewn and stuffed monsters, mermaids, and monkeys are as fearsome as they are furry and funny. Occupying the space as fully ensconced inhabitants, they both seduce and surprise. One, titled This Is Not A Sloth (Tip of My Rod), jumps out at you from above, a primate that sports a huge, red-tipped pecker and sneers (or smiles?) while hanging upside down from a tree branch (all ingeniously made of printed fabric).

Another monkey figure squats desultorily but menacingly in a corner, shreds of an Oriental rug marking the trail of its retreat. Pieces of carpeting form important parts of other Furtwangler pieces as well, just one example of her capacity to find new ways to use available materials.

The gallery's promotional description of Furtwangler's influences - "the painting of Hieronymous Bosch and Francisco de Goya ... comic books, tattoo culture, 1980s LA punk rock lore, horror movies, Catholic iconography, taxidermy and biological illustration" - says a lot about how fresh and challenging this artist is. She is definitely one to watch.

It's The Thread That Binds continues through April 17; it will be open during Albany's monthly 1st Friday event on April 2. To watch a video of a discussion with the artists, click here.

Randy Garber at Opalka Gallery

This will be a short review of a wonderful exhibition.

Randy Garber's Reverberations, on view at the Opalka Gallery at Sage College of Albany through April 18, is an unusually cohesive amalgamation of diverse media by a Boston-based artist of strong and subtle vision.

Going in, due to the gender-neutral name, I didn't know whether this artist is male or female; now I do know (and just to brag, I'll tell you I did guess correctly), but will leave that information unstated in case you also want to try to decide that question for yourself just by seeing the work. The dominant theme of the show is sound - no, it's not a sound installation, but it makes repeated references to music and rhythmic resonance, from its title to images of a horn player to drumlike constructions to a marvelously innovative woodcut print on player piano scrolls.

But Garber has other potent themes: transformation is evoked in copper plates that have been etched for printing, but then further etched into decayed shapes and re-used in a wall construction titled Connect; Asian contemplation comes across in three large, vertical, screenlike hangings made of etched and inked copper piping; and nature, whether human or animal, has a presence in many printed images on paper as well as in a trio of biomorphic oil paintings and a group of four small, vibrantly colored gouaches.

Most impressive about this exhibition is the way it totally and perfectly occupies the large, high, white space of the Opalka. I've seen many exhibitions in this space over the years, and it can be a challenge to fill successfully - but Garber makes it look easy. That is, Garber and guest curator Ruth Hall Daly, along with the Opalka's able staff. The fact that many of these pieces were made specifically for this installation shows that it's the result of a very successful collaboration.

One of those pieces (a detail of which is shown in the image at the top of this post) incorporates light but elaborate copper armatures with round fragments of intaglio prints sewn to them, playing translucency off light and shadow in a fabulous confabulation of forms that are mounted directly to the walls. Titled Receive, it is an extraordinarily unexpected and well-executed combination of media.

Language is another theme of Garber's that is woven throughout the show, whether directly as part of the images or in titles. The phrase "what you already know" is used repeatedly, even in multiple languages, as a sort of mantra. It reminds me of a lyric from the Simon and Garfunkel song The Boxer, that says "a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest."

Does Garber mean to say that we can only see what we already know? If so, the artist has successfully contradicted him/herself by showing us things we most certainly have never seen before.

My only quibble with the show is a small one, but here goes. One prominent piece, titled Echo (and shown below), which has been used to publicize the exhibition, a bit too closely resembles giant, concentrically rolled condoms - and its central image of an open-mouthed woman doing something oddly suggestive with her hands does nothing to disabuse me of that association.

Hudson Galleries

Spring was in the air, and a nice walk for the whole length of Warren Street in Hudson yielded the expected treasure from the region's most concentrated collection of art galleries.

Karen and I went to help a friend celebrate her part in a show, took in others that were having events and openings, and topped it off with a superb dinner at Ca' Mea, where Massimiliano greeted us warmly and invited us to visit him at his other eatery in Cortona, Italy, if we were ever in the neighborhood. For the food, in this case, no need to go to Cortona!

So, on to the art. First up, a collection of four painters presented as View Four, on exhibit through March 20 at Nicole Fiacco Gallery, whose pristine white cube of a room is probably the most perfect exhibition space anywhere north of New York City outside of a museum. The four painters - Robert Roane Beard, Stephen Courbois, Jeanette Fintz, and Enrique Kico Govantes - naturally are arrayed one on each wall, but with almost too much white space to go around and an annoying (for me) total lack of labeling.

Though they are shown in the same exhibition, the connections among them are a bit vague, centering on color and geometric pattern as methodic foci. Taken individually, I was most impressed by Fintz, whose modestly-sized acrylic triptych on wood panels and much bigger pair of acrylics on canvas played a complicated call-and-response. With shapes derived from a systematic application of the circle and hexagon, played out in a bottomless-well of expressiveness, Fintz applied challenging palettes of blue, green, and pink in one large piece called Andalusian Shards #2 (shown at top of post); staring at it is a bit like falling into the sky.

Also inspired by nature - including the human kind - are the four seasonal squares by Govantes (Winter, Karen's favorite, is shown at right; Summer is shown above). I like the energetic brushwork, the strong color shifts, and how Govantes strikes a balance just midway between abstract and figurative. Though it's a clichè to reference the seasons, he does it extremely well - look at the way Summer vibrates and you feel its heat.

Beard's work is directly taken from landscape, some Irish, some Columbia Countyish, and he does it on a very small scale - no bigger than about 5 by 7 inches (one is shown at left). His skill and style are easy to like, but the work seemed a bit frivolous to me, reminiscent of the once-overly popular graphic artist Folon.

Courbois is somewhat the odd man out in this group: His extremely dry approach to an exploration of muted colors in repeated shapes is quintessential Modernism (which is to say early 20th century). Not properly referred to as a painter, he employs a very subtle technique similar to chin collè printmaking to make contemplative constructions like the one shown here.

This is the kind of work that only serious art lovers can really get much out of - a narrowly focused theme-and-variation that you must really work to appreciate. I'm not lazy, but I prefer artwork that reaches out more ardently to the audience.

That would be a fair way to describe much of what has been brought together for the annual Painted Cities exhibition at Carrie Haddad Gallery, on view through April 11. This year's edition of the show is bristling with positive energy and some very fresh work, including lush "drawings" by Paul Chojnowski that are made from nothing more than water and fire (the one shown at right is titled Evening on the Avenue).

Other highlights include a savvy, atmospheric view of Troy's industrial waterfront by Tony Thompson; Staats Fasoldt's masterful little watercolors; and a group of painted moments by Judith Wyer that evoke great street photography - not by dint of excessive realism but by their skillful observation and cropping (the one shown at left is titled Pedestrian).

An even more popular approach is taken by the Columbia County Council on the Arts, whose 14th Annual Juried Show is on view at the Hudson Opera House through March 28. Judged by University at Albany Art Museum Director Janet Riker, this year's show awarded first and second prizes in 5 categories (painting, photography, sculpture, mixed-media, and works on paper), as well as a best-in-show, so everybody gets a little glory.

Riker is no pushover, however, and the work in the show is strong in each medium, providing a terrific opportunity to get a good overview of a diversity of excellent artists from the region. My favorites are too numerous to mention, though I must credit Hunger Moon, a video by Alan Coon that plays on animal and human locomotion; Car Jack, an amazing, very large drawing on wood panel by Keith Batten; and a simple - but not simplistic - stack of bricks by Jean-Marc Superville Sovak titled It Can't Last (shown at right).

Also presenting a large number of artists in one space is the Limner Gallery, whose Emerging Artists 2010 will be on view through March 27. I confess it was my first time visiting Limner, though it's been open under the wise guidance of an outstanding self-taught painter named Tim Slowinski since 1987 (!!!). It proved to be a great, if late, discovery.

I like a gallery that sets a style, and Limner is very much in that mode. All the art tended toward certain ideas and aesthetics that reflect, but do not mirror, Slowinski's own: carefully crafted, realist or Surrealist, deeply into social commentary. Many of the works showed good chops, but one stood out as truly extraordinary - a color drawing by Roberto Osti called Agnostic's Flight (shown at the bottom of this post). You must see it up close to be totally wowed by this piece, and you will, I promise, be wowed.

Finally, a show of abstract paintings by Claude Carone is at John Davis Gallery through March 28 and, as I always find at Davis, the work is impeccable. Elegant, warm, but with a tinge of the dark side, Carone's work is evocative without being representative.

This impression is borne out by his titles: Wind in Tinehir (shown above at left) or Glorious Morning, for example, are not meant to merely label the painting. After scanning the artwork, then noticing a list of these suggestive titles, I saw one that sounded familiar. Sure enough, Diver's Vision referred to the very painting I was thinking of - formally similar to the others, but with an undeniable underwater tone.

Other paintings in the show range from bright and linear to mysterious and layered, from the pastel-light to the earthily charred. The size range is modest, from about 8 by 10 inches up to about 2½ by 3 feet, but the surfaces and color relationships are very rich. It's a show not to be missed.

Oddly Alive at the Arts Center

Oddly Alive, a well-conceived show of seven artists' work curated by Lauren Wolk, occupies both the main gallery and secondary space at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, but it does so in a light way. The art is sparsely placed, with a lot of white space everywhere, and it isn't very dense or colorful work; rather it's on the contemplative and quiet side. Well, there is noise in the show (delightfully), but the slightness that remains is oddly consistent with past shows at the Arts Center, despite its ever-changing rotation of curators.

Wolk has written a sensitive and descriptive statement that greets visitors near the entry of the bigger room, and it is helpful in explicating the themes of the show, which include direct exploration of materials such as fabric, glass, and wax; inspiration taken from the biological world; the passage of time; and action or interaction. "Ultimately," Wolk writes, "the show asks viewers to engage in self-reflection as they interface with the works."

For me, that experience had its ups and downs. Most intriguing were the blown glass and steel wall-mounted sculptures by Graham Caldwell, which nicely mingle attraction and revulsion; the startling sound pieces of Ven Voisey; and the wide embrace of Sky Kim's untitled drawings and watercolors.

Caldwell, whose Augur is shown at right above, is able to use color well, but most of his other works here are in shades of white. His innovative application of a combination of materials and the use of armatures to bring the pieces out from the walls is very successful.

Voisey present only three pieces, two of which are on an intimate scale - the other one runs nearly the length of the gallery's space (shown at top of post) like an overhead assembly line. When you walk under it, it springs to life with the mechanical thwackings of dozens of strikers against tethered paper, bringing to mind the action of a swarm of angry locusts. This is an artist who has matched method perfectly to intention. His message seems to be: WAKE UP!

Kim's works on paper range from a densely-packed graphite page about 24"x30" to a tremendous, colorful scroll that runs down the wall and halfway across the floor (detail at left above). Her marks are individual, even in some sense random, but the radial patterns they create belies her organic, perhaps microscopic, sources.

Also clearly inspired by the world of bugs, or undersea critters, is Rachel Adams, whose Elaborate Autobiographies is shown at right below. Made of wax, string and glass beads, this piece is more still life than animation. Other works of hers are more threatening; one inhabits a corner of the big gallery like giant white worms in a net, while another consists of modular forms piled around a column.

Mayumi Ishino presents what I understand to be the remains of a performance: Seven 12-inch-square mirrors, six of which have deftly drawn self-portraits in colored markers and are severely crushed, and one of which is untouched. All are mounted in a row on the wall, below average eye-level, perhaps so the viewer is not distracted by their own reflection. I can't comment on the performance, but the existing installation left me unmoved.

I also can't comment on Sabrina Gschwandtner's projection piece, as it was out of order when I visited the gallery. The curator describes the piece as an exploration of "the behavior of cotton thread in response to the light and fan inside [the projector]."

Finally, a group of color photographs by Marianne Fourie make images out of light trails traced against a black sky (some shown below). Her titles range from the overwrought to the deadpan (Passion and Pain are two of them, and the others are all on the order of the following: Walking along MacMillan Pier on September 13th, 2008, at 8:21), but they do nothing to elevate these pictures above those easily found at amateur snapshooters' shows.

Overall, I wish Oddly Alive had just a little more spunk. It's on view through March 19.

20 Printmakers at Union College Arts Atrium

It's a neat trick for a curator: Ask some artists to participate in a show, and then have each one invite another artist to join them. You get freshness, diversity, surprises - and don't have to take much heat if it doesn't really work as a whole.

Union College printmaking professor Sandy Wimer has applied this technique to craft a really nice printmaking invitational featuring 10 regional artists and the 10 artists from beyond the region they invited. Here and There: Two Degrees of Separation presents the participants in pairs, with a short statement from each inviter explaining their choice of invitee. There is also a useful introductory essay by curator/printmaker Debora Wood of Northwestern University, which neatly sums up the major techniques and overriding philosophies of the printmaking media for those not well-versed in them (which, honestly, means most of us).

The Burns Arts Atrium at Union College is a clean, well-lit exhibition space, slightly off the beaten track but not hard to find on the campus (behind or around the corner from the Yulman Theater), and its long, horizontal space works well as a frame for this sprawling display of 40 pieces of art.

The local artists are mostly familiar names, and their counterparts are mostly new ones for local viewers; the range of media thay employ is wide, including lithography, woodcut, several forms of etching, monoprints and, of course, digital, augmented in some cases by watercolor or collage. There is no uniformity of style or subject matter, not even between most of the pairs, though the work falls largely within the parameter of being smallish in scale.

It is important to point out that all these prints were made by the artists, who identify as printmakers (whereas many artists who make prints work primarily in other media and use printmaking as a tool for creating multiples, often in ateliers that specialize in helping them to do that). As a survey of what printmakers these days are doing, it's an excellent representation, and the quality of the work is consistently high.

One can approach the show as a sort of smorgasbord, and just enjoy the lovely techniques, strong imagery, and challenging ideas - or you can think about the relationships between the artists who are paired up (not to mention those among the original 10, many of whom have close ties within the local community). I found both processes worth exploring.

Some highlights:

• 
Milt Connors invited Judith Hugentobler, because both look at mass-media images and seek to transform them. These works are perhaps the least traditional in the show - Connors uses black-and-white photography (created or found?) while Hugentobler makes color digital collages based on old Hollywood head shots.
• Sandy Wimer invited Bill Hosterman, whose exquisitely crafted etchings provide a microcosmic counterpoint to Wimer's own macrocosmic lithographic views. Both employ great subtlety in their applications of traditional media.
Allen Grindle invited Jason Stewart, whose flippant irreverence nicely balances Grindle's esoteric grimness.
• Thom O'Connor invited Cècile Boucher, a French Canadian whose digital montages display Gallic humor blended with Canadian defensiveness. O'Connor's spectrally transformed, photo-based self portraits make you realize that Boucher's work is also a kind of self-portrait, but more cultural than personal.
• Sunghee Park invited Manuel Guerra, contrasting the ways in which each has brought elements of their ancestral culture into making contemporary American images.
• Harold Lohner invited Jenny Robinson, a San Francisco printmaker, whose work relates to Lohner's indirectly, by way of their shared level of excellence.

I was piqued to find that in every pair but one the inviter chose a person of the opposite sex. I don't know if this is common in the art world as a whole, or more so among printmakers, but I hope it's a sign that we've reached a point of equality between men and women in a realm where that was quite markedly not the case for centuries.

Key to images (from top to bottom):

Sunghee Park Pear Tree 2 lithograph, chine collè, colored pencil

Marion Preston Untitled watercolor, woodcut

Cècile Boucher Don't Look Back digital

Jenny Robinson Gasworks spitbite, drypoint

Bill Hosterman Reach etching

Allen Grindle Receptor etching, watercolor

Larry Poons at Esther Massry Gallery

Larry Poons Monkey Liner 2008, acrylic on canvas

Larry Poons is a little, grey man who makes big, colorful paintings. His recent visits to The College of Saint Rose to install a solo exhibition and give an artist's talk stirred up quite a bit of excitement and just as much controversy - not surprising for an old-school enfant terrible whose reputation for pushing boundaries appears to have been well-earned.

The opening reception for Larry Poons: Recent Paintings at the Esther Massry Gallery on Feb. 5 was absolutely packed, as was that evening's talk, and the air was abuzz for days after as scandalized art lovers, their eyes glittering, asked each other if they'd been there or not.

Though I couldn't stay for the talk, I gather that this icon of bad-boy painters fulfilled all expectations with his obscurity and outbursts. I also heard about various moments of provocative behavior during the installation process, further burnishing my impression that Poons has the outsized ego to match his world-famous New York City painter's image (that's him in the photo above, taken by Massry Gallery Director Jeanne Flanagan in front of the 2009 painting La Famiglia).

So, I expected to have a very hard time liking the paintings when I returned to the gallery to take them in (viewing them at the opening, despite their scale, was an impossibility). And, at first, that's how it was: The work felt angry, undisciplined, and unresolved. Still, I knew it couldn't be that simple. Poons requires the viewer to work - not as hard as he does, but harder than we're used to when looking at abstract art.

What happened eventually, as I gave the show more time over two extended visits, was that the paintings began to open up, revealing their depth and - can I bear to write it? - sensitivity. In fact, what had appeared quite ugly to me on superficial inspection started to actually seem beautiful.

The show includes just 11 paintings (all acrylic on canvas), but they are so big and complicated that the spacious gallery feels almost overfull. Seeing the installation as a whole is extremely difficult, and looking at the paintings from any great distance is fairly useless. Perhaps a different kind of installation that breaks up the space would have helped by forcing a more intimate viewing distance.

From close in - that's where I began to have a better experience of this work. At less than two feet away, one enters the world of the painting, and is immersed in the myriad marks and colors that make up its surface. Not coincidentally, that's also the distance from which Poons most likely would have made the paintings. Entering his point of view, the conflicts that pervade the bigger compositions go away, and the light begins to overtake the darkness.

Once on better terms with the extremely painterly surfaces of these works, it becomes easier to look at them again from further away - the colors that were obscured in the complexity reach out, and the structured aspect of the compositions becomes more apparent. This is of course more true with some than others (such as the painting shown above, titled Playing for Keeps).

My favorite piece in the show best combines both of these characteristics, providing a structured composition that looks good from most distances and imbuing it with the filtered light of a spring garden (shown below, it is titled Grayson 45). Many would argue that this work is only about the painter and the paint, and they could very well be right. But I found, again and again, that staring at these paintings was a lot like having a face full of flowers - a not entirely pleasant feeling, but not entirely joyless, either.

The show continues through March 21 but will be closed for Spring Break from Feb. 28 to March 7.

Dan McCormack at The PhotoCenter

You don't have to love the nude female form to like Dan McCormack's photography, but it wouldn't hurt. A survey show of 51 of his pieces, on view at the Photography Center of the Capital District through Feb. 21, depicts almost nothing other than women, all of them nude except when presented just from the neck up, and it does so in a great variety of methods and media.

To those of you who have read my recent review of the Carroll Dunham show at UAlbany, this will sound repetitive, but it happens to be true: This work is not so much about the subject, or the image (though many of the images are quite wonderful) - it is really very much about the process.

In this instance, we are pleasantly confronted with a cornucopia of photographic alternative processes: cyanotypes, palladium prints, silver prints, photograms, and digital pigment prints are derived from original negatives made with everything from a homemade pinhole camera to a four-lens novelty 3-D camera to an office scanner to a Fuji 6x17 Technopan (the dollar range there goes from empty oatmeal box to so expensive that you don't buy it, you rent it by the day).


So, what is McCormack about? Like I said: Process, process, process. Oh yeah, and he really, really likes women. Reminds me of Garry Winogrand, a venerated street photographer of the '60s who published a book titled Women are Beautiful, and who meant that in the most sincere and accepting way. McCormack's women are not necessarily beautiful in the classic sense, but he sees them as beautiful and he makes them so in his pictures. He also makes them look monstrous - yet still beautiful.

McCormack is clearly very interested in the relationship among images - a great deal of the work shown here is presented in multiple form as diptychs, triptychs and so on. Only a few pieces stand alone - most of those are elegant, diminutive cyanotypes (blue prints) of a woman engulfed by water or lushly, even psychedelically colored pigment prints. The latter group involves a lot of solarization, which can have some pretty cool optical effects on its own, but then McCormack works in layers and layers of vivid pigment to complete the transformation.

Tiny images contact-printed on standard silver paper from the four-lens camera's negatives are grouped by fours, up to 24 together, which evokes Muybridge, but without the continuity. Taken to another level are several pattern prints that repeat almost to infinity, making a grid that looks more like a weaving than a photograph.

The selection and installation is very thoughtfully done. Despite the number and range of the works included, it is easy to experience it as a whole - this is a tribute to the curating of the PhotoCenter's Katy Wright, but also to the clarity and consistency of McCormack's vision.

Though he has a long history of working in this region, and has shown his work a whole lot, McCormack's solo shows are few and far between - try not to miss this opportunity to see both the breadth and depth of an important, under-recognized artist.

Installation view provided by the PhotoCenter; all other photos by Dan McCormack

Please note: the PhotoCenter's hours are 5–9 p.m. Monday,Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; and noon–6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; also by chance - call (518) 273-0100 and you may find someone in at any time (that's what I did one early afternoon).

And, while you're in the neighborhood, check out the current exhibition at Martinez Gallery on the Broadway edge of Monument Square, where a show titled What are You Doing Now? includes a strong cross-section of regional and international artists, including George Hofmann, Leigh Wen, Gay Malin, George Simmons, and Caren Canier (whose small painting/montage is pictured below). Hours are 2-5 p.m. Weds-Sat and by appointment, (518) 273-9377.