“Waterman” by Catherine Sebastian.
This past week saw the opening of “I Have a Place in Mind” at Imogen Holloway Gallery on Partition St., with work by Nina Katchadourian, Bobby Davidson, Michel Alhadeff-Jones and Keiko Sono. As the title of the exhibit suggests, each of the artists represented has a distinct take on concepts of time and place.
This is the first time that gallery owner Diane Dwyer has turned over the curatorial reins since opening last May. Guest curator Michael Hanchett Hanson, who teaches creativity and cognition at Columbia University, says the works on exhibit explore the way photography and video, often used to document places and events, can also influence the way we construct our ideas of places, and how conceptual transformations through art broaden those ideas.
Nina Katchadourian is an artist of international reputation who grew up in California. The two large C-prints (chromogenic color prints) displayed here are photographs of road maps she has dissected (her word) from paper maps, cutting up the entire roadway system of a place and reforming it into a dimensional metaphor of the place. For example: “Austria,” known as the “heart of Europe,” in the shape of a human heart and “Head of Spain,” the freeway network of Spain reformed to resemble the head of a bull.
Brooklyn-based artist Bobby Davidson is represented in two 20 by 24 inch photographs that use images of water to represent imagination in the movement from consciousness to sleep. Then in a sequence of five small digitally fabricated works on paper, from a series called “US Letter,” we see barely-there imagery of ordinary city sights, like a hot-dog stand or an escalator, printed in matte ink on a backing of almost flesh-toned coloration. Inspired by a literary passage about 9/11 in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, the barely discernible images are rendered oddly moving, evoking the swirling clouds of debris that obscured everything in sight that day.
Social theorist and Columbia professor Michel Alhadeff-Jones shows two videos that explore unconscious movement. Watching O’Keeffe is a 12-minute loop of video that captures images of a crowd of museum-goers at a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit. Because we only see them from the knees down, it’s their movement our eyes are drawn to; that shifting of weight and circling of the room as each painting is observed. It’s a slow dance of sorts as people move their bodies while their thoughts are elsewhere, preoccupied with what they’re looking at. Alhadeff-Jones also exhibits two six by 19 inch photographs, “Escape #2” and “Escape #3,” that depict his wife, a dancer, in a moment of movement caught in time.
Keiko Sono contributed two versions of “Suspended Carbon,” one a 13 by 14 inch work and the other a large window installation, along with a video of the work in progress. The “candle soot” works are made in a manner that suggests the ephemeral effects of time, as Sono holds delicate paper over a burning candle just long enough to capture the soot in patterns on it without the paper catching fire. Sono is the owner of Flick Book Studio in Saugerties, which teaches stop-motion animation techniques, and she’s done a number of site-specific installations that explore concepts of time.
“I Have a Place in Mind” is on view through Sunday, April 28. The Imogen Holloway Gallery is located at 81 Partition St.
Across the street, the Partition Street Wine Shop at 102 Partition St. has a selection of landscape photographs by Woodstock-based photographer Deena Feinberg on the walls at the back of the shop. While displays there are periodically rotated, co-owner Suzanne Balsamo emphasizes that it’s not an actual gallery: they don’t sell the work or represent the artist, and if someone wants to purchase a work on display they need to contact the artist directly. It’s more of an informal thing, she says, displaying the work of artist friends.
“Landscape Observations” also deals with matters of time. Feinberg says the images represent “a series of moments that I documented over the last year as a way of tracing my memories of these places and times.” The exhibit is on view through June 3.
Elsewhere the Saugerties Public Library has mounted the second of its quarterly art exhibits with colorful paintings and abstracted metal wall reliefs by Jim McElrath of Saugerties. Curated by Steve Crohn, head of the library’s Arts & Exhibits committee, the show’s opening reception is Saturday, April 20. The Saugerties Public Library is located at 91 Washington Ave. Crohn also curates artwork for Town Hall, with landscape photographs by Susan Goldson and watercolors by Anita Barbour currently on view in the courtroom and adjacent hallways.
New World Home Cooking is exhibiting large pigmented photographic prints on canvas by Catherine Sebastian, sculpturally-influenced hand-pulled prints by Alex Kveton (if you’ve seen his sculpture there’s no mistaking the hand at work here) and a number of assemblage wall sculptures by Lenny Kislin, who organized the exhibit. Time seems to have been on his mind, as well, as the large constructions feature a clock face prominently. In one, “Racing Against Time,” two women hold an enormous egg between them as they stand in front of a (biological) clock. Kislin will put together future shows at New World to rotate about every six weeks or so. An opening reception for this one is planned for Saturday, April 27 from 3–5 p.m. New World Home Cooking is located on Rte. 212 between Woodstock and Saugerties. For more information, call (845) 679-8117.