Kiki Smith and Whiting Tennis at the Tang

Two artists of both shared and contrasting sensibilities are presented in solo shows at Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum through the end of the year. Kiki Smith is by far the more famous and influential of the two; her show did not originate at the Tang, having been brought in from the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle. Whiting Tennis, who hails from Seattle himself, is the subject of a Tang "Opener," whereby the museum's curators make a point of introducing an artist not previously broadly exposed in this area. So we have the known and the unknown side by side; the Seattle connection may be intended or not.

I Myself Have Seen It: Photography and Kiki Smith includes a very great number of photographs, but it also features sculptures, drawings, prints and mixed media, all of which are what the artist is widely known for producing. She is considered a feminist, in that her work runs counter to male-dominated viewpoints regarding the female body in art, and she is clearly very much of her time - a child of the '60s and '70s, wild and undisciplined in many ways.

The installation of I Myself Have Seen It is highly structured, however (see view at the top of this post), prominently featuring a narrow ledge at the bottom edge of the gallery's walls that supports an array of countless 4x6-inch color prints in minimal plastic box-frames, running like a subtitled narrative below the entire text of the exhibition. On the walls are many larger, properly framed photographs, as well as the other works, in great big groups and sequences.

Smith's imagery is process-oriented, often derived from ongoing sculptural installations, and it is gritty, grim, even gruesome by turns. Bodies are depicted nude, distorted and dismembered; faces are expressionless. This is not easy work to confront and, despite a lyrical patina to some of the colorful photographs that belies Smith's overall deathliness, difficult to enjoy.

In contrast, Tennis, who has his own flirtation with deathly imagery in the form of gallows- or coffin-like forms, is like a breath of fresh air. Where Smith is grim, Tennis is playful. Where Smith seems to carry the scars of a brutal childhood, Tennis seems to be carrying on the joy of childish exploration. Like Smith, Tennis is comfortable working in a variety of media; unlike her, he seems to have mastered his techniques, whereas Smith appears to be locked in a never-ending struggle with them.

Tennis shows a curious mix of influences: Pablo Picasso, Philip Guston, and Ed Ruscha all come easily to mind when viewing this collection. One room, which contains just five pieces, all dated 2011, represents all these influences and more. A painting titled Droopy (shown at right) is loosely brushed in narrowly limited shades of grey (Guston); another painting with collage (shown below), similarly structured but far more colorful, picks up the Cubist vein (Picasso); and an all-white wall relief that accurately depicts a streetscape has uninflected observation at its core (Ruscha). Then there is a perfectly formed geometric octagonal prism atop a crusty, wooden found table - going in another direction entirely, yet still in harmony with the rest.

Two crowded groups make up the highlight of this show in the sense of revealing Tennis's process. On one wall, a constellation of 36 drawings, prints, paintings, and constructions mirrors the type of installation used in Smith's exhibition downstairs. These works are variously cast, painted, printed, texturized, stamped, or shaped. Tennis is one of those artists who doesn't worry about how he makes it, he just has to make it however it needs to be made.

In another space, a large display of objects on shelves (shown at the bottom of this post) provides potential hours of perusal - there are 108 little sculptures in it, all around 6 inches tall, all handmade. It's an impressive display of ingenuity and skill, but also of freedom.

A lot of the work in Tennis's show is from the past year, showing an artist who seems to have really hit his stride; it's a pleasure to discover this work, which is exactly the experience intended by the Opener series.

Ratings: Smith - difficult to recommend; Tennis - Highly Recommended

MoHu

Some day we will all be bragging that we were here for the first MoHu festival. Let's get out there and make it real!

Public Art speaks volumes

Clown Soldier - Rensselaer Riverfront Art Park

If you haven't had public art on your mind lately, there are two current reasons that maybe you should. One of them is the 9/11 sculpture commissioned by Saratoga Arts to be made out of World Trade Center steel by two prominent local sculptors, John Van Alstine and Noah Savett, which should have been unveiled last weekend but wasn't (background here). The other is the Living Walls project that also launched last weekend and will be the focus of a broad spectrum of events this weekend in Albany.

Amid all the hubbub surrounding the 9/11 anniversary, there was the unfortunate story of how this significant piece of art has been turned into a political football by various folks in Saratoga Springs, who decided they didn't like either the initially approved siting of the 25-foot-tall abstract memorial, or a second proposed location (for a good overview of the debacle, read Tom Keyser's coverage from the Times Union).

It always galls me when people who otherwise do not involve themselves with art suddenly feel entitled to act against it when they see something they don't like being given prominence in public. A couple of significant examples from the recent past include the removal of a long-standing sculpture, which critics compared to a collapsed staircase, from its spot near a government building in downtown Albany; and the very controversial and expensive removal of a monumental Richard Serra sculpture from a public square in Manhattan.

Tempered by Memory
Noah Savett and John Van Alstine
photo: Lawrence White

In the Saratoga case, the smell is the same - if this were a bronze image of a thoroughbred horse or a ballerina or a heroic firefighter, I am sure there would have been no outcry. But it's not. It's an abstract sculpture made of 9/11 tower steel, and some people are uncomfortable with what it represents to them, so they consider it their right to spontaneously become public art critics.

And so, instead of having been dedicated on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the monument sits in the steelyard where it was made, awaiting its fate. The good news is that the sculpture has been accepted, and a committee appointed by the mayor is set to meet so they can review and recommend sites; the Saratoga City Council will then consider these recommendations and make a final decision on where it will be placed.

Important to note: The funding for this work of art has come entirely from private donations. To everyone who gave money to support this endeavor, I would like to offer thanks for your courage and your generosity. This is not a friendly time for artists and arts organizations, and they need your support like never before.

Meanwhile, all over Albany and near the river in Rensselaer there are crews of local, national, and international street artists producing monumental works of their own on the walls of buildings and the supports of highway ramps. (Street art is the more palatable name now given to graffiti muralists, but these days it means a lot more than spray paint and gangster tags, incorporating stencils, broadsides, stickers, and other materials - even ceramic tile - into the often gigantic works these artists create.)

The Living Walls project writes on its website: Through a series of lectures, performances, and the involvement of some of the world’s great mural artists, we are looking to provide an education into public art. The Living Walls project is intent on creating an open dialogue between the people and city.

Sounds great to me. For more information, go to the website, facebook page, twitter, tumblr, etc., and you will find more events than you can shake a spray can at going on throughout the weekend. And then, for as long as they endure, there will be those walls.

GAIA and Nanook - Livingston Avenue

 

Environment and Object: Recent African Art at the Tang Teaching Museum

Yinka Shonibare - Black Gold I

It can be easy to do if you live nearby, but please don't take Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum for granted. While other local museums regularly present wonderful exhibitions of art we love, shows at the Tang often take it a step further - challenging us to think about art in new ways and helping us to see a bigger picture of the world than we are accustomed to seeing.

While this process at times can be unpleasant, a current Tang exhibition titled Environment and Object: Recent African Art makes the most of the visual joys of a group of well-established African-identified artists (not all of whom live on the continent or were born there) to expose and explore some very difficult issues that Africa currently faces. Curators Lisa Aronson and John Weber have chosen well, highlighting the process, the politics, and the pictorial results in equal measure to create a show that is as enjoyable as it is disturbing, with art that feels both relevant and exotic.

Romuald Hazoumé -
Claudia Maigre

Though many name artists are included, this selection of 16 has a pair of stars around which the rest seem to revolve - the internationally renowned Ghanaian artist El Anatsui and his Nigerian student Bright Ugochukwu Eke each re-use discarded material to make vast tapestries of form and color (analagous to the vast continent itself). Eke's two site-specific constructions of plastic drink bottles (some of them still a bit sticky) and charred slices of fallen timber were made with the help of a legion of Skidmore students, an ideal application of the "teaching museum" concept, and they look great in the space (to watch videos about the process, click here).

Anatsui's wall-hung piece titled Some Still Come Back appears woven but is made of many thousands of aluminum liquor bottle caps and bands, flattened and sewn together with wire into a flowing, vibrant sheet of color and pattern 10 feet across. It is so impressive as a physical work of folkcraft that it can be easy to forget one of its implications: that inebriation in massive quantity has serious costs.

The social costs of our appetites is a large subtext of Environment and Object as a whole. The artists Viyé Diba and Nnenna Okore address the mass consumption of the marketplace in their works, the former by re-creating the appalling crowdedness of his native city of Dakar, Senegal, in a lyrical and charming room-sized installation, and the latter through a sinister-looking net made of plastic shopping bags.


Zwelethu Mthethwa - Untitled (from the Coal Miner Series)

Things get even darker in an "oil room" that has been set aside for three artists who are responding to the ravages caused to the environment and economy of African countries by our thirst for that fuel. Here, in photos by George Osodi and sculptures by Sokari Douglas Camp, human beings are more directly represented as desperate victims of circumstance; while that grim feeling is abated by a ravishing wall piece by Yinka Shonibare (shown at the top of this post), the damage, as it were, has already been done - we are no longer having so much fun at the museum.

Nearby, that theme continues, but with more subtlety, in the form of two huge photo-portraits by South African Zwelethu Mthethwa of a coal miner and a garbage scavenger. In these images, the dignity of the subject outweighs his circumstances - but does it really? Certainly not in the thoughtfully arranged works of Congolese photo-collagist Sammy Baloji, which aim at the heart of industrialization and its negative effects on the African colonies even decades after they have regained independence.


Barthélémy Toguo -
Stupid African President 2

A lighter note is achieved in photographs by the Cameroonian performance artist Barthélémy Toguo, who sends up foolish and dangerous post-colonial African leaders, and in ingenious and humorous masks by the Benin-born Romuald Hazoumé, which update old traditions of using the materials at hand, in this case empty plastic jugs and phone wires rather than carved wood and iron nails.

Environment and Object: Recent African Art also includes photographs by Garth Meyer, Georgia Papageorge, and Lara Baladi, and paintings by Jerry Buhari and Chéri Samba, and is augmented by a great deal of technological wizardry, including a "web feature" and a cellphone tour. The show opened in February, and continues through July 31, after which it is expected to travel throughout the Northeast.

Rating: Must See

El Anatsui - Some Still Come Back

Commencement

It's the time of year for graduations, and with that comes a spate of annual shows of culminating work by seniors and graduate students from the region's major art degree-conferring institutions.

Currently, the UAlbany MFA show at the University Art Museum tops the list, with Sage College of Albany's BFA exhibition at the Opalka Gallery and Skidmore College's Senior Thesis exhibitions at the Tang Museum right behind. (Already ended, in quick sequence, were the Senior and Graduate shows at The College of Saint Rose's Esther Massry Gallery; the Student Exhibitions at Hudson Valley Community College's Teaching Gallery also recently closed.)

These exhibitions are important to see if you have an interest in the regional art scene, because it's almost guaranteed that many of the new graduates will quickly rank among the most prominently shown professionals on that scene (past and current examples abound), and these shows often provide your first good glimpse of what they do.

I make a point of catching the thesis shows every year if I can (not always easy, as they sometimes have very short runs), and they're usually intensely interesting. Still, I won't be writing any critical commentary on them, neither this year nor in the future.

Why not? My editor offers two reasons:

1) Even though they're graduating, and technically are not students anymore, these fledgling artists may not be ready for the feedback a professional critic provides. Once they're out of the institution, whether showing in a coffee shop or a museum, we'll let the slings and arrows fly - and hope we all get something useful out of it. But until that time, these student artists deserve to bask in the glow of their achievement without critical attention from the press. Also, there's no doubt they've all had endless critiques on this work already as part of their degree qualification process, and that's enough for now.

2) While the writing on this blog occasionally ventures into other areas of commentary, it is first and foremost a forum for art criticism - not educational analysis. We feel that to enter into a discussion of the merits of any group of students at a particular institution while they're still within its walls gets too close to engaging on the subject of the choices that institution has made in its admissions, hiring, and degree-awarding policies - and we just don't want to go there.

That's also why Get Visual's no-student-show policy extends to faculty shows - and why the current exhibitions by Martin Benjamin at Union College's Mandeville Gallery and Regis Brodie at Skidmore's Schick Art Gallery will also go unreviewed in this space, as each is (or was) a professor at the host college. That said, I will go out on a limb and say they are both strong artists whose work is well worth seeing.

One more thing - I happen to be among this year's graduates, and will walk on Saturday in cap and gown to receive a master's degree in business administration from The College of Saint Rose. You should be relieved to know that I don't expect any of you to read the 100-page analysis of a Chinese solar energy company that comprised my MBA team's final project - but I hope you will take time to check out the thesis shows of all those worthy fine art grads.

Finally, to all of them I offer sincere congratulations, and best wishes for future success.

John J.G. Roth: Figment Transport at Saratoga Arts

Beginning with the title, there is a lot that's intriguing about John J.G. Roth's installation of sculptures on view at the Saratoga Arts Center Gallery through March 26. Even before seeing the show, Figment Transport begins working a sort of magic on our imagination - it's exactly the evocative combination of words that promises an equally evocative artistic experience.

As it turns out, the show is both very, very good and ever so slightly disappointing. In it, Roth offers two virtually separate but equal bodies of work - dioramas that present spooky little vignettes, most of them encased inside elaborate hardwood cabinetry; and whimsically creepy quasi-critters on wheels.

Roth's skill with a variety of plastic media is supreme, and his ideas are original - both hallmarks of a first-rate artist - but the disparity between the two groups of work is somewhat disorienting. Also, they insufficiently fill the spacious gallery, making for a sparseness that cools down the effect of what could otherwise have been a very engaging viewing experience.

Of the 12 works on view, six feature sinuous forms covered in metallic discs that give them the appearance of being scaled like a lizard or a fish (the one pictured at the top of this post is titled Cretaceous Mode). Indeed, two of them are shown as if in water; these two pieces also bridge the gap between the rolling works and those inside cabinets. The others, which crouch upon their wheels (one instead hangs suspended from a wire), are about equal parts boy's fantasy car and evolutionary anomaly.

Roth satisfies the almost irresistible urge to stroke these untouchable sculptures by providing a sample of the metal scales you can touch. But I found the sleek machine forms almost as repellent as they are attractive - which, I suspect, is the key to their underlying charm and to unlocking the artist's intent.

Though these "conveyances" are the more recent, I prefer Roth's other work, both for its preposterous wit and for its colorful darkness. The detail shown above at right, from a work titled Gleamin' Freedom, exposes the satire inherent in these works, but it can't communicate what it's like to see them in the gallery, where scale and obscurity play major roles. To see what's shown in the photo, you have to bend and peer through Gleamin' Freedom's peephole, which reinforces both the irony and the near-impossibility of its glowing message.

My favorite piece in the show (pictured below) is equally impossible. Titled Divine Imperial Commuter, it depicts a retro-futuristic train engine simultaneously going both ways on a track to nowhere. Its display case conjures 19th-century cabinets of curiosities, while its ambition mirrors that industrial age's excesses. Is it still relevant today? You better believe it is.

Rating: Highly recommended

The Jewel Thief at the Tang Teaching Museum

Think what it would be like if you had a friend with a really wild modern art collection, and you were invited to hang out for a while in their home gallery. Now imagine that the living room/gallery is more of a playground, built on a giant scale, with a soaring ceiling, broad swaths of bright colors and shapes on the walls and floors, a series of huge blocks marching through the middle of it, and viewing stands of varying heights from which to take it all in.

This Alice-in-Wonderland scenario is what it’s like to experience The Jewel Thief, organized by Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum curator Ian Berry in collaboration with Yale University administrator and sculptor Jessica Stockholder. Publicity for the show aptly describes it as “immersive” and it’s true that one can feel a bit like they’re drowning in a sea of so much art; also describing it as experimental, the show’s organizers clearly want to lead viewers into a place where they can experience abstract art in a new way.

The more than 100 works in the exhibition by 60 or so artists include a significant number from the Tang’s permanent collection, while the rest were borrowed from artists, collectors and commercial galleries; some of those were designed and installed specifically for this show. Almost every common medium is abundantly present: painting, drawing, sculpture, and textiles, as well as decorative media such as wallpaper, furniture, and light fixtures. Printmaking is represented by just a handful of items, and photography is entirely absent (unless you count the one color photograph by Anne Delaporte, which is entirely covered in gold leaf and therefore invisible).

The historical sweep of the show is also broad, with at least one piece from every decade going back to the 1950s – but it is by no means a survey (nor intends to be), and the great majority of the works date from 2000 or later. The show is perhaps best summed up as an amusement park designed by two connoisseurs of abstract art who had access to tons of great material and could think of nothing more fun to do than to present it all to the rest of us in a fresh way.

This is accomplished by various stratagems. Take those blocks, for instance. As you approach the Tang’s main gallery from the museum’s entrance, you confront the first of them: a 13-foot cube painted on most of two sides in camouflage (following instructions by Jim Hodges), it shares dominion over the space with a large, permanent staircase, a temporary structure of metal bleachers (one of the show’s viewing platforms), and a seating group by the artist James Hyde. One has room to move around the cube, and is free to climb either staircase for a view from above, but the siting of it sends an immediate message that this is a show that may mess with your perceptions – or your preconceptions.

If, like me, you should choose to squeeze past one corner of the big cube toward the gallery entry (not birth-canal tight, but suggestive enough), you would find that entrance somewhat blocked by a second cube 10 feet high, which, like the other, is festooned with art (a surprisingly great many pieces in this case). Several other blocks follow in an angled line through the big room, ending in one just two-feet cubed, with a single small sculpture perched upon it (and too low for my middle-aged back’s comfort).

Once inside the room, you begin to discover other curiosities about the installation. A large wooden platform fills one corner, with a series of colorful and sharp-angled other platforms of varied heights stepping up to it. This, you soon learn from the helpful staff, is a sculpture by Stockholder – and, yes, you are expected to walk on it if you wish. A couple of other sculptures sit upon it already, which surprised me at first, but it is not the only instance in the show of one person’s art being mounted atop another person’s.

The rest of the room features different kinds of floor and wall treatments, from a Batcave-like space created by Liz Larner to cradle some of her porcelain works (and, no, you are not expected to enter it) to the aforementioned swatches of bright geometry on walls and floor. Pictures are hung salon-style throughout the room, in lines and groups and crowds that sometimes go up quite high. This is true outside the main gallery as well, and that’s where the scaffolds and steps come in so handy. (Mental note: I must try to remember to bring a step ladder to the next big museum show I visit.)

A printed guide with color thumbnails and identifying information for each artwork accompanies the show (which, wisely, has no labels), resulting in a treasure-hunt atmosphere for those who pick it up. This became a big part of the fun, because, believe me, not every work of art was immediately easy to spot. Also, as it turned out on my visit, the last page of the guide had become (temporarily?) obsolete, as several works had been removed from an upper “bridge” in the museum to make way for a new show’s installation. My guess is that they will be replaced after the upstairs exhibition’s packing crates are safely out of transit.

You may have noticed that I am not saying much about the specific artworks in The Jewel Thief. This is not because they are unworthy of comment – indeed, there are many wonderful works on view, by people most of us already know about (examples include Andy Warhol and Joan Mitchell) to folks I’ve seen in other Tang exhibits (such as John Torreano and Allan McCollum) to relative unknowns, and even a couple of locally shown artists (Victoria Palermo and Christopher Harvey). Some of these artists are represented by just one piece, while a few have as many as five or more on view – but in any case, this is a show that seems meant to be perceived as greater than the sum of its parts, and it makes the parts themselves seem relatively undeserving of specific comment.

Now, smarter people than me have addressed the issue of curator vs. artist for a good long time, and I don’t expect to add much to that discussion here. In fact, I think there was a panel discussion about that subject presented last fall as part of the programming around The Jewel Thief (the show opened in late September). So, suffice it to say that this show brings the issue up – big time.

I have to wonder: Do any of the artists in the exhibition feel used? Or do they feel exalted by inclusion in such an important and interesting event? I suppose some artists have smaller egos and are genuinely happy to be part of the greater whole (after all, whether they like it or not, they are merely a part of the contemporary scene, and an even smaller part of the whole history of art and culture). But I also suspect that a lot of artists, known to have big (and sometimes quite fragile) egos, may be feeling vaguely bad about it. Not as bad, perhaps, as those left out, but still …

All that arguing aside, make no mistake - The Jewel Thief is a heck of a fine exhibition, with a ton of really beautiful drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, etc. in it. You have until Feb. 27 to take it in – be prepared, once might not be enough.

Rating: Must See

Photographs by Arthur Evans, provided by the Tang

"Natura" at Saratoga Arts

Ryan Parr Uda 2006 oil on canvas

Saratoga Arts, the recently renamed site of the Saratoga County Arts Council, has dubbed its current two-person show Natura.

Featuring the work of Naomi Lewis and Ryan Parr, Natura is a pairing more related to a shared fascination with patterns than with the natural world, and it offers the opportunity to see larger bodies of work by two UAlbany-connected artists who have regularly appeared in larger group shows around the region, but in less depth.

Lewis, who first became known as a printmaker, received an MFA in that medium from the University at Albany in 1999 and has worked there ever since, currently as exhibition and outreach coordinator for the Art Museum; Parr got his UAlbany MFA in drawing and painting in 2005 and his work has been seen in Fence Select at the Arts Center in Troy and in the Mohawk-Hudson Regional at the Albany International Airport Gallery.

Here, apart from one digital experiment with a wallpaper idea, Lewis presents not prints, but delicate, elaborate drawings of intertwining ropy vines that have textures and shapes reminiscent of Celtic knots carved in stone. All but one of them are in shades of grey, made either with graphite or India ink (the only colored one, shown above at right, is a watercolor titled Wound Up).

Works on paper are always a tough sell, and even more so when monochromatic. But Lewis combines impeccable technique with a degree of obsession that is hard to resist, making for a mesmerizing trip around the gallery to try to suss out her coils and tangles. The pieces vary in size from less than a foot square to about 30" by 40" - they also vary in complexity, whether in the organization of the vines themselves or in their degree of ornamentation.

Among the most recent is a set of four small Tangles, each of which very succesfully combines the compression of a knot with the open space around it. Her surface treatment of these forms is almost Escher-like in its dimensionality and complexity - so we know the printmaker must be still alive and well. Overall, it's a very fine body of work.

Parr's contibution to the show is somewhat less coherent, though it achieves a couple of strong passages among the nine oils on canvas included.

One of those moments occurs in the careful observations of watery surfaces in three of the paintings (the one shown above at left is titled Nothing Instead of Something). Here, Parr's highly-tuned ability to render an almost photographic image is put to good use in focusing our attention on something we likely would never notice - or even be able to see - if he didn't paint it for us.

The other fine moment comes in the form of a triptych (perhaps intended as such, perhaps not) of 4-foot-by-6-foot vertical paintings that depict incompatible subjects in a neutralizing way. Hence, he makes a green screen of trees and vines equal a maelstrom of blue jigsaw puzzle pieces equal a pink mishmash of naked male dolls. Individually, these paintings may seem somewhat senseless; together, they begin to carry something more than what they show on their surfaces.

Parr is a very able painter, but he has made some missteps, especially with a 2010 piece titled Puzzle of Pills and one from 2008 titled Soul Sold Separately (For Jeff Koons), both of which seem too intent on their broad messages to be very engaging as personal works of art.

Natura continues through May 29 - please note, the Arts Center gallery will host a discussion with the artists at 7 p.m. this Thursday, April 22.

Fred Tomaselli at Tang Museum

Note: This will be the first of two reviews from Saratoga Springs. The second, on the exhibition Natura at Saratoga Arts, will post in several days

It's not often that an exhibition by a major artist goes on view in our region before heading to New York, but that's the case with the Fred Tomaselli survey, which will travel to the Brooklyn Museum after its current showing at Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum.

Tomaselli is an immensely likeable artist whose work captures a nice chunk of the American zeitgeist from his (and our) times by drawing freely from sources as broadly spaced as Western landscape, catalog marketing, shamanistic drug culture, Persian rug designs, and Renaissance painting, and then riffing on them in layers of diverse media. Perhaps there are others who also make art out of plant leaves, pills, photo collage, acrylic paint, and resin - but if there are, they will always be compared to Tomaselli as the original.

For those who aren't familiar with his oeuvre, this exhibition is the ideal introduction. Co-organized by the Tang and the Aspen Art Museum, where it previously showed, the mini-retrospective covers a range of about 15 years with 30-odd pieces, most of them significant in scale, and includes several seminal smaller works that give very useful perspective on Tomaselli's evolution as an artist.

The earliest pieces date back to about 1990 and are quiet, thoughtful, photogram-based black-and-whites that introduce the theme of drugs (or rock bands) as a proxy for identity. Three from 1995, titled as individual portraits, present carefully labelled constellations of substances (caffeine, Prozac, LSD, etc) that the subjects have ingested. These are strong pieces on their own but also provide a window into Tomaselli's more ambitious pieces, in which psychedelically fractured humans toil against a backdrop of cosmic blackness and brilliant energy (such as the untitled image shown at the top of this post).

Other works are more pattern-oriented (see Echo, Wow, and Flutter at the bottom of this post), perhaps as a response to issues on abstract art's attempts to be universal (i.e. non-specific). They're impressive, but I prefer the images that depict individual Everymen and women, especially because they do it somewhat awkwardly and are therefore poignantly true to life.

Tomaselli is also deeply involved with nature as a subject, mostly represented by birds and plants. A 2003 series of Field Guide pages, elegantly transformed by cutting out and replacing the birds with colorful printed images of fleece or down jackets (example at right above), makes a clear, humorous cultural statement while simultaneously demonstrating the appeal of collage as a medium.

My one concern in viewing this show was that Tomaselli's most important pieces, despite being sealed under thick layers of clear acrylic resin, are visibly deteriorating. Plant leaves that started out relatively green and fresh (as seen in reproductions in the accompanying gorgeous tome of a catalog) are now golden brown; cheap pills, such as Tums, that once provided playful pastel color notes, are fading and crumbling. It's likely that the artist expected these changes and considers them an integral part of his process, but one misses the strength of the original colors - acceptable in a 400-year-old fresco, but worrisome in an otherwise carefully made work of art from the 1990s.

Fred Tomaselli is on view at the Tang through June 6. See it, and also check out the wonderful works on paper and sculptural installation by Cuban duo Los Carpinteros, which opened on April 8 and will be there through Aug. 8.

Lives of the Hudson (and K.O.S.) at Tang Museum

Enough with the Hudson River 400th anniversary exhibitions already! Everybody is having one, including the New York State Museum, Albany Institute of History & Art, Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz, Hudson River Maritime Museum in Kingston, and Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, among the larger sites, and the list goes on and on with smaller galleries.

But maybe it isn't enough - as was pointed out in a recent issue of Metroland, 400 years is a heck of a long time, and well worth celebrating. So it is in that spirit that I recommend the latest offering in this field, an eclectic exhibit called Lives of the Hudson at Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum. This is new territory for the Tang, known for cutting-edge art and far-reaching academic crossovers, not for history exhibits. But, even if you're hooked on the Tang's often tongue-in-cheek style of curating, you shouldn't be disappointed with this thoughtful and still edgy offering of art and artifacts from the last 200 years of life along the Hudson.

The show gets off to a promising start with a curtained entrance that reveals what looks like the corner of a historic house museum - curio cabinet, gold-framed landscapes, sage-green walls, white mouldings and all. But then you notice that the pattern on the curtains (by Bob Braine and Leslie Reed) is of poison ivy, and hear the sounds of some kind of ambient music wafting from a darkened theater area beyond the green walls, and you know you really are in the Tang after all.

An introductory text explains that the exhibition is organized around four themes (the Natural River, the Imagined River, the Human River, and the Working River) and that we are invited to perceive those themes on our own as they weave throughout the gallery. This lightly structured approach makes for low-pressure viewing and encourages the process of discovering relationships for ourselves.

As with some past shows here, this one tries to make the most of juxtaposing a broad range of techniques and technologies to tweak our interest and stimulate our synapses. While it may be pretty obvious to place a giant wood-and-brass steamboat steering wheel in front of a row of misty color photographs taken from a train window as it rolled along the river in 1999, it's still fun to contemplate their continuity.

More subtle is the pairing of a gutsy 1937 Bruce Mitchell gouache of the river and its industry with a trio of photos from 2006 by An-My Le that present the same subject matter from a similarly lofty point of view (a Le photo is shown above). One can't help but ask whether much has changed along this river in nearly a century of "progress."

Nearby, sober horizontal cases contain treasures as diverse as an antique postcard collection and three deeply satisfying works by the Ashcan School luminary John Marin. Not surprisingly, his two small sketches and medium-sized watercolor are as good as anything in the show.

Also nearby is the jewel in the crown of this show, and one of the great works of 19th-century American art: A stunningly modern landscape by Thomas Cole titled Storm King of the Hudson, which is on loan from Ball State University in Indiana. Though not of great size (maybe 24 by 36 inches) Storm King is so powerful that it would dominate the viewers' attention were it not intelligently given modest placement near the back of the room (you can see it at the bottom of this post).

Fortunately, the Cole is not alone in capturing our attention in this wide-ranging conglomeration. Other highlights include a desktop-sized computer monitor that runs a virtual aerial view of the river from bottom to top as seen on Google Earth (created for the show at a Skidmore lab using the Global Information Systems program); a very tasty 1931 lithograph of the New Hudson Bridge by Howard N. Cook; four mounted "fish" by Braine and Cook that are cast from polluting materials such as road salt and toilet paper; Maxine Henryson's Everyday series of photographs mentioned above; a large 2008 Yvonne Jacquette painting of quiet city reflections on the river at night; and an elegiac film installation by Alan Michelson.

If you have to see just one commemorative exhibition for the quadricentennial, this may be the one to choose. And, while you're there, you can go upstairs and check out a terrific 25-year retrospective of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. that will end on August 23rd. Featuring mostly very large paintings that span styles from graffiti to minimal, all inspired by "great literature," the show explores the impressive output of a collective that arose out of school workshops with the artist and his inner-city "kids of survival."

Oliver Herring at Tang Museum

The current exhibition by German-born multimedia artist Oliver Herring at Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum http://tang.skidmore.edu/ is not perfect, but it is still cause for celebration.

Me Us Them is part of the ongoing Openers series that Tang curator Ian Berry created to bring artists previously unseen in the Capital Region to the attention of local audiences, and it is a great example of the wisdom of that idea. The show, which runs through June 14, is something of a retrospective by the 45-year-old, Brooklyn-based artist, and it serves as a wonderful introduction to the breadth and depth of his work.

The title of the show refers to three phases of Herring's working process that have resulted in three very different types of art. Quoting from the Tang's press release, they include "large hand-knitted sculptures made in long hours alone in his studio (representing the Me component of the show’s title); experimental videos and photographic works made with friends and acquaintances (Us), and the improvisational community performance event, Task, that Herring creates with large groups of strangers (Them)."

The earliest works in the show, from 1991, are the knitted sculptures (example at right), laboriously created from strips of silver or colorless Mylar. Apart from their extraordinary combination of materials and method, these pieces are impressive in scale and degree of difficulty - but their outstanding characteristic is how relentlessly obsessive they reveal the artist to be.

In viewing the rest of the show, that characteristic will be recalled again and again, and it is a key to both Herring's technical success and his poignancy.

The installation, in usual Tang fashion, makes brilliant use of the museum's large first-floor main gallery, this time by walling off a chunky wedge of space in the middle of the floor and then using all of its angles and planes to great advantage. Inside the wedge, a hodgepodge of works is arrayed in a studio-like manner, giving the viewer a space within which to join the frolic of Herring's active mind and hyperactive fingers.

Meanwhile, the wedge's front-facing wall serves to block the view from the gallery's entrance of works further inside that are not appropriate for schoolchildren to see - in this way, the many school groups that do use the Tang (it's not called the Teaching Museum for nothing) can enjoy part of the Herring exhibition without causing the kids' parents to freak out. And the back wall of the wedge provides a nice, big, white space on which to project a continuous loop of some of Herring's many videos.

Are the pieces that the wedge blocks offensive? Not if you're OK with frontal male nudity - but hey, this is America in the 21st century, so we're not all there quite yet. I'll admit, it is not an everyday experience to stand in a public space and try to act natural while examining the simulated pubic hair of a life-size and lifelike dude in three dimensions, and it did make me feel self-conscious - but I was glad to have the chance to do it anyway. Herring's two highly detailed yet quite different renditions of a friend named Wade are a tour-de-force of innovative method and sculptural integrity.

Using thousands of snapshots and a meticulously carved styrofoam form to build his portraits (there's also a clothed female in the museum's lobby area), Herring plays with light, form, texture and other elements easily associated with all photography and all sculpture, and he does it in a way that feels somehow natural despite its almost mind-boggling labor intensiveness.

Other work in the show, mostly photographic, relates to these sculptures pretty directly, but they are quite a leap from the more minimalistic and simplistic Mylar works. One series of early stop-action videos, dated 1998, makes reference to 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge and other major art-historical imagery (such as Russian constructivism) while remaining fresh and witty. Too many artists these days make art historical references in such an academic and mannered way that it's tedious, but not Herring.

His other videos, too numerous to take in on one visit or to mention by name, are also fresh and witty, if a bit crudely made or obtuse. There is one related piece, though, that occupies a very large back wall of the gallery and, I think, falls seriously short of its goal.

Titled Do Two Monologues Make a Dialogue? (and pictured at the top of this post), it is a photographic snapshot installation of two crisscrossing chronological series; one is of a hot, young skater dude cavorting at home and outdoors, the other a pair of teenage Catholic schoolgirls hanging out. In the location where the two series intersect, Herring has put a shot that replaces the guy with one of the girls, forming a sort of contextual overlap like you might see in a film dissolve.

While I like the idea of the question the piece poses, and the simple approach taken to explore it, the series themselves lack any real fascination or depth. The one of the young guy has all the hallmarks of a Gus Van Sant study of Keanu Reeves (i.e., if you're not gay, forget it) and the one of the girls feels forced and superficial. Nothing is revealed about the subjects or the question the piece poses, even though many works of photographic and printed art over the decades have played far more successfully with this idea. I would have welcomed another astute or insightful approach to it, but was disappointed.

Otherwise, the show is consistently excellent, interesting, challenging and - this is important - fun. I'm sorry I can't report on the Task element, as that took place on March 22 and I couldn't go, but perhaps a reader of this blog was there and can comment on it here. No doubt it was as quirky and offbeat as one would expect from the fertile mind that Me, Us, Them explores.

Wandering Intention: Zlotsky, Sericolo, Cirmo at The Saratoga Arts Center Gallery

There may be a bit too much of a good thing at the Saratoga Arts Center Gallery http://www.saratoga-arts.org/ this month, where the show Wandering Intention brings three Albany County artists together in a grand congress of transmogrification.

Deborah Zlotsky, Sergio Sericolo, and Brian Cirmo are all well-known on the local art scene, and with good reason, as each is an able and original image-maker. While there are clear similarities among their work, that may only seem obvious because of the show - it still seems to me that the idea to bring them together was a stroke of genius, and the inclusion of both paintings and graphics by each artist enhances the veracity of that assessment.

This does not mean, however, that the large, almost sprawling exhibition is without problems. But an ambitious exhibition with problems is far more satisfying than a show that doesn't strive, and far more stimulating, too. Chief among those problems is the installation - and, at the same time, the installation is one of the show's chief assets. I'll try to explain that conundrum, and then I'll go on to describe each of the artists' work individually.

Exhibitions Coordinator Laura Colomb has intermingled the three artists' work throughout the spacious gallery, making groupings of all permutations on different walls. In a smaller show, I think this would work wonderfully, because it makes the viewer consider the relationships among this trio and understand aspects of each artist's work in ways they probably wouldn't otherwise. But in a show this big (there are 13 pieces by Cirmo, 18 by Zlotsky and 14 by Sericolo), it leads to some confusion, as it is difficult to focus on each individual artist; this challenge is compounded by the diversity within two of the bodies of work.

First up, in the reverse alphabetical order of the show's title, is Zlotsky (I can't help but think she must be pretty glad that somebody finally put her name first on a list). Recent years have seen her depart from a realistic style to take on abstraction, as well as surrealism, both in painted color and graphite gray. She states: When I work, I’m like a dowser with a forked stick, searching for signs of life.

The show includes paintings, both fairly large (the image above is of one about two by three feet) and very small (in the 5x7-inch range) and graphite drawings on Mylar. The larger paintings have the feel of studio experiments - some look distinctly unfinished - and are, for me, unresolved.

The smaller paintings, not just because of scale, are far better resolved, whether in terms of color or composition - I'd say Zlotsky is more comfortable working small. And that's OK, as these are truly like little gems and not at all lacking in power.

Best of all, though, are the drawings, in which Zlotsky creates as if by magic creepily biomorphic forms that are both utterly abstract (made up of squiggles of powdery material) and super-realistic (rendering recognizable bits of skin, hair, and organs). For all the works, Zlotsky has applied titles that are newly made words - Pivel, Quish, and Wattobottomy are examples - putting her in a special category of creators who add to our vocabulary of forms and words.

Sericolo is also a shape-shifter, working spills of paint and turpentine into recognizable, surrealistic landscape images and reworking antique etchings to create surprising and sometimes beautifully hideous results. "I set out to depict nature as it might actually appear," he writes, to create something "that is, though fantastic, essentially more real."

Sericolo includes fairly large paintings and quite small drawings in this exhibition and, again, while the paintings are capable of holding our attention in both the full image and the minute details, it is the smaller works that maintain our fascination. Described as "razor blade and graphite drawings," they also use extensive erasure to transform their source material of story or silver-catalog illustrations into fantastical scenarios that feature unknown life forms suggestive of rampant mutation or mutual destruction (one is shown above).

Altogether, Sericolo's is a coherent vision, albeit somewhat macabre, and it is not surprising that it was rewarded with an extremely competitive NYFA grant a few years ago. He is one of our strongest artists.

Cirmo is somewhat the odd man out in this trio. His nine paintings (one is shown at the top of this post) and four drawings in the show are a consistent group that depict a landscape (or cityscape) animated by a faceless, often bodiless figure with nubby hair and beard, and heavy black glasses. This everyman character is a stand-in for Cirmo himself, who is inspired by the distinctly American quest for freedom and, perhaps, identity.

" ... like Kerouac ... or Guthrie," Cirmo writes, "my modern-day hobo is truly free and truly mad." With the clear influence of late-period Guston, these cartoonish vignettes often include natural elements, such as plants and rock formations, and lately are including blue-striped pillows. They also have been known to allude to war and other forms of violence, sometimes becoming seriously blood-spattered in the process.

Cirmo is a curious cross between hopeless optimist and shrugging realist. He has the guts to make art that is neither pretty nor necessarily comprehensible, and for that he should be commended. So should the Arts Center for mounting this fine, challenging exhibition.