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Times Union, Albany, NY

A TOO-NARROW REGIONAL FALLS SHORT OF ITS MISSION

TIMOTHY CAHILL Staff writer

Sunday, July 13, 2003

ALBANY The Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region exhibit is an annual reunion of sorts. Each summer, this survey of our area's art scene offers the community a chance to catch up with the newcomers and elders of the tribe, and view breakthroughs of style (or lack thereof), technique and thought. Artists from a hundred-mile radius use the regional to show off new work, gathering for what amounts to a family portrait taken each year by a different prominent juror.

Many elements contribute to the relative strength of each regional, but one factor that remains constant is the show's singular importance on the local arts calendar. In this regard, this year's installment at the University at Albany's University Museum is especially disheartening, for it seems to have forgotten, or shrugged off, its public mandate. Seldom has a regional been this unfulfilling.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the exhibition simply does not contain enough work, nor represent enough artists. Traditionally, the regional, which rotates among UAlbany, the Albany Institute of History & Art and the Schenectady Museum, contains approximately 100 works by some 40 to 70 artists. This year, it offers just 35 pieces by 17 artists.

That's not a regional, it's a sectional.

You have to wonder, were the roads blocked, the weather bad, all the car batteries dead? In fact, despite poor planning (the show's call-for-entries landed in artists' mailboxes just a couple of weeks before the deadline), more than 220 artists submitted 1,000-plus slides to juror Maura Heffner, late of the Whitney biennial and now head of exhibitions and programs at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Conn. From this sequoia of submissions, Heffner whittled the toothpick now on view.

One wonders if Heffner was ever briefed on the traditions of the regional, or if she simply chose to ignore them. Regrettably, she compounded the failing by not even explaining her thinking. Her comment on the show's insubstantial size amounts to a single contradictory sentence in the exhibit catalog. ``The final selection of seventeen artists,'' she writes in her equally insubstantial essay, ``has less to do with exclusivity than with the acknowledgment of their specific works. ... ''

Sorry, but that sounds precisely like a definition of exclusivity. Why not at least own it?

STRENGTHS

In any case, the shortcomings of the regional's scope shouldn't take away from the strengths of the show itself.

Among the Heffner 17 are two printmakers, three sculptors, four photographers (three digital), four painters and four collage-installation-assemblagists. Taken taken as a group, they represent a fairly standard cross-section of mainstream art practices. The most prominent of the show's works are Christopher Cassidy's juror's-prize-winning installation ``From Albany to the Adirondacks'' and Michael Oatman's oversized collage ``The Birds.''

Cassidy, a recent UAlbany master's of fine arts grad, presents the show's most ambitious work, a huge steel filing cabinet rigged with an irrigation device. Inside the cabinet, a series of troughs are planted with wild botanical specimens dug up from 15 sites between the artist's studio on Albany's Railroad Avenue and Snowy Mountain, near Indian Lake in the central Adirondacks. Behind the cabinet are maps plotting each stop, and a series of ho-hum snapshots of the project. The pleasure of the piece is the clever and elaborate way the artist used the unwieldy cabinet to construct his miniature plant museum. This workmanship far exceeds the work's fake-science, taxonomy-as-art conceit.

With his ``The Birds,'' Oatman seems intent on one-upping the tongue-in-cheek malevolence of Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same name. Oatman has assembled a series of 29 framed pictures into an enormous metal grid, each image a mock-sinister collage of birds with guns. In a deft display of cut-and-paste, Oatman has taken textbook renderings of avians from eagles to flamingos to wrens and portrayed them toting rifles, machine guns, automatic pistols, rocket launchers even, in one instance, an old flintlock. A series of small scenes like this rings a large central panel depicting a stand-off between two warring ornithological factions.

As a ``Bowling for Columbine'' statement about our culture of violence, ``The Birds'' has its own seriocomic resonance, but, like much of Oatman's work, the piece's primary reward is the ride it offers inside the artist's roller-coaster imagination.

If these two pieces make the biggest first impression, other works are quieter but perhaps ultimately more powerful. Jo Ann Axford's porcelain vessels derived from botanical forms are so tactile and suggestive you want to caress them. Justin Baker's spiraling artist book is inscrutable at first glance, but from a distance takes on an almost religious majesty. Harold Lohner's 20-foot monoprint ``Long Sleep,'' a series of male nude studies from assorted challenging perspectives, meditates with great sensitivity on the stillness and beauty of intimates lost in dreams.

PAINTERS

Of the four painters here, Jane Bloodgood-Abrams makes the deepest impression with her pair of ``micro-macro'' landscapes inspired by Hudson River School paintings. Each work contains the luminous sweep of Catskill mountains and valleys, coupled with a still-life detail imagined from the bigger scene. The juxtaposition inspires both awe and inspection and invites a rewarding mindfulness.

In contrast, the idea behind Jenny McShan's sculpture ``The Twelve Realms of Purity'' is an off-handed one-liner about white-black stereotypes, but I can't help smiling at her dozen light-to-dark, bride-and-groom figurines cast of chocolate.

We've seen David Brickman's Arbor Hill photographs and Louanne Genet Getty's peephole installations displayed before, both in greater depth. Allison Hunter's digitally manipulated photos of zoo and circus animals suggest the beginnings of an interesting series, but it doesn't feel fully conceived. A dramatic sky painting by Josephine Bloodgood suffers from a strangely wan technique. And there's a junk-food quality to the puns of David E. Levine's cereal box collages, ``Ricocoa Krispies'' and ``Post Raphael-Lites.''

Anticipating the art community's consternation at this year's meager exhibit, acting museum director Jason Stewart put some distance between himself and juror Heffner.

``The fact that many artists were not selected was not, in itself, an indication of the quality of their work; it was simply the particular point of view of the juror,'' Stewart wrote in his catalog acknowledgments. ``Having said this,'' he continued, ``the healthy dialogue that surrounds this exhibition will echo throughout the region.''

But the echo won't compensate for the regional's failure to provide the discourse artists and art-goers rely on each year from this benchmark exhibit. Instead of a free-ranging discussion of the area's artistic vitality, UAlbany has provided a half-hearted colloquy among too few participants.

Times Union, Albany, NY
A TOO-NARROW REGIONAL FALLS SHORT OF ITS MISSION
TIMOTHY CAHILL Staff writer	Sunday, July 13, 2003
ALBANY The Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region exhibit is an annual reunion of sorts. Each summer, this survey of our area's art scene offers the community a chance to catch up with the newcomers and elders of the tribe, and view breakthroughs of style (or lack thereof), technique and thought. Artists from a hundred-mile radius use the regional to show off new work, gathering for what amounts to a family portrait taken each year by a different prominent juror. Many elements contribute to the relative strength of each regional, but one factor that remains constant is the show's singular importance on the local arts calendar. In this regard, this year's installment at the University at Albany's University Museum is especially disheartening, for it seems to have forgotten, or shrugged off, its public mandate. Seldom has a regional been this unfulfilling. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the exhibition simply does not contain enough work, nor represent enough artists. Traditionally, the regional, which rotates among UAlbany, the Albany Institute of History & Art and the Schenectady Museum, contains approximately 100 works by some 40 to 70 artists. This year, it offers just 35 pieces by 17 artists. That's not a regional, it's a sectional. You have to wonder, were the roads blocked, the weather bad, all the car batteries dead? In fact, despite poor planning (the show's call-for-entries landed in artists' mailboxes just a couple of weeks before the deadline), more than 220 artists submitted 1,000-plus slides to juror Maura Heffner, late of the Whitney biennial and now head of exhibitions and programs at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Conn. From this sequoia of submissions, Heffner whittled the toothpick now on view. One wonders if Heffner was ever briefed on the traditions of the regional, or if she simply chose to ignore them. Regrettably, she compounded the failing by not even explaining her thinking. Her comment on the show's insubstantial size amounts to a single contradictory sentence in the exhibit catalog. ``The final selection of seventeen artists,'' she writes in her equally insubstantial essay, ``has less to do with exclusivity than with the acknowledgment of their specific works. ... '' Sorry, but that sounds precisely like a definition of exclusivity. Why not at least own it? STRENGTHS In any case, the shortcomings of the regional's scope shouldn't take away from the strengths of the show itself. Among the Heffner 17 are two printmakers, three sculptors, four photographers (three digital), four painters and four collage-installation-assemblagists. Taken taken as a group, they represent a fairly standard cross-section of mainstream art practices. The most prominent of the show's works are Christopher Cassidy's juror's-prize-winning installation ``From Albany to the Adirondacks'' and Michael Oatman's oversized collage ``The Birds.'' Cassidy, a recent UAlbany master's of fine arts grad, presents the show's most ambitious work, a huge steel filing cabinet rigged with an irrigation device. Inside the cabinet, a series of troughs are planted with wild botanical specimens dug up from 15 sites between the artist's studio on Albany's Railroad Avenue and Snowy Mountain, near Indian Lake in the central Adirondacks. Behind the cabinet are maps plotting each stop, and a series of ho-hum snapshots of the project. The pleasure of the piece is the clever and elaborate way the artist used the unwieldy cabinet to construct his miniature plant museum. This workmanship far exceeds the work's fake-science, taxonomy-as-art conceit. With his ``The Birds,'' Oatman seems intent on one-upping the tongue-in-cheek malevolence of Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same name. Oatman has assembled a series of 29 framed pictures into an enormous metal grid, each image a mock-sinister collage of birds with guns. In a deft display of cut-and-paste, Oatman has taken textbook renderings of avians from eagles to flamingos to wrens and portrayed them toting rifles, machine guns, automatic pistols, rocket launchers even, in one instance, an old flintlock. A series of small scenes like this rings a large central panel depicting a stand-off between two warring ornithological factions. As a ``Bowling for Columbine'' statement about our culture of violence, ``The Birds'' has its own seriocomic resonance, but, like much of Oatman's work, the piece's primary reward is the ride it offers inside the artist's roller-coaster imagination. If these two pieces make the biggest first impression, other works are quieter but perhaps ultimately more powerful. Jo Ann Axford's porcelain vessels derived from botanical forms are so tactile and suggestive you want to caress them. Justin Baker's spiraling artist book is inscrutable at first glance, but from a distance takes on an almost religious majesty. Harold Lohner's 20-foot monoprint ``Long Sleep,'' a series of male nude studies from assorted challenging perspectives, meditates with great sensitivity on the stillness and beauty of intimates lost in dreams. PAINTERS Of the four painters here, Jane Bloodgood-Abrams makes the deepest impression with her pair of ``micro-macro'' landscapes inspired by Hudson River School paintings. Each work contains the luminous sweep of Catskill mountains and valleys, coupled with a still-life detail imagined from the bigger scene. The juxtaposition inspires both awe and inspection and invites a rewarding mindfulness. In contrast, the idea behind Jenny McShan's sculpture ``The Twelve Realms of Purity'' is an off-handed one-liner about white-black stereotypes, but I can't help smiling at her dozen light-to-dark, bride-and-groom figurines cast of chocolate. We've seen David Brickman's Arbor Hill photographs and Louanne Genet Getty's peephole installations displayed before, both in greater depth. Allison Hunter's digitally manipulated photos of zoo and circus animals suggest the beginnings of an interesting series, but it doesn't feel fully conceived. A dramatic sky painting by Josephine Bloodgood suffers from a strangely wan technique. And there's a junk-food quality to the puns of David E. Levine's cereal box collages, ``Ricocoa Krispies'' and ``Post Raphael-Lites.'' Anticipating the art community's consternation at this year's meager exhibit, acting museum director Jason Stewart put some distance between himself and juror Heffner. ``The fact that many artists were not selected was not, in itself, an indication of the quality of their work; it was simply the particular point of view of the juror,'' Stewart wrote in his catalog acknowledgments. ``Having said this,'' he continued, ``the healthy dialogue that surrounds this exhibition will echo throughout the region.'' But the echo won't compensate for the regional's failure to provide the discourse artists and art-goers rely on each year from this benchmark exhibit. Instead of a free-ranging discussion of the area's artistic vitality, UAlbany has provided a half-hearted colloquy among too few participants.