The need for social distancing to protect patrons from Covid-19 has meant harder times than usual for the arts, with museums and galleries forced to limit their exhibitions and other programming to virtual platforms. That hasn’t sat well with Sevan Melikyan, owner and curator of Wired Gallery in High Falls.
“To judge an artwork from what you see online isn’t right,” he says, noting that such aesthetic factors as graphic quality, volumes and textures that are critical even in a two-dimensional piece tend to get lost when you’re looking at it on a screen.
As “somebody who gets motivated by people,” Melikyan also relishes the human factor of artists and art-lovers gathering and interacting. He was disappointed when the gallery was forced by the pandemic to cancel the scheduled March opening of a memorial exhibition of shadow boxes and other constructions from found objects by the recently deceased High Falls-based artist Chris Lawrence. “People were flying in from California and other places,” he recalls. “I never realized how much these gatherings gave me motivation.”
The gallery’s last show before it was forced to close down altogether was a group exhibit of works by Ulster County teens, mounted in May. “We would have canceled it if it wasn’t for the teens,” Melikyan says. “We did a virtual event online, and it was so difficult. There were a lot of technical problems, and I found that I can’t fully be present when I’m dealing with them. I didn’t want to do it again.”
The curator found himself depressed by his inability to present art to the public in a live setting. “The pandemic really hit me in the stomach. I ran out of steam and air,” he says. “I really considered going out of business.”
A large part of what kept him going over the months when Wired was totally closed was a gig presenting slideshows via Zoom to subscribers of the Cape Cod-based travel company Artful Journeys, based on photographs and notes that Melikyan had taken while conducting art tours to France and Italy in 2018. The first series of 32 “Artful Journeys” lectures was enough of a success that he has been asked to do a dozen more. “It has been an incredible lifesaver. It definitely gave me an outlet,” he says.
Meanwhile, on the home front, local photographer Lauren Thomas was dealing with her own temporary layoff by volunteering to assist Melikyan in reorganizing the artworks he keeps in storage. The gallery was rethinking how to hang works for a new revolving group show, dubbed “Re(Wired).”
“Lauren came over and went up into the attic. She’s been helping a lot,” he says.
One result of this new approach is a sort of mini-exhibit that he’s calling the “One-Wall Show,” in which a section of one room in the gallery is set aside for works by a single featured artist that will rotate every few weeks. A soft reopening in August spotlighted works by Esopus-based painter/sculptor/photographer Robert Hite, who died in May. Three photographic prints of whimsical shacks from Hite’s Imagined Histories series are still on view as part of the “Re(Wired)” collection of works by 21 Hudson Valley artists. “All the works that you see were left behind from previous shows,” Melikyan notes.
The end of September saw the focus of the “One-Wall Show” shift to “supremely talented” Woodstock-based Modernist painter Johnny Mernin, whose works bespeak the influences of Picasso, Klee and Miró. “He has a very good sense of composition, of colors,” says Melikyan. Front and center is a large painting titled Bull in a China Shop, a riot of dynamically grouped shapes in vivid turquoise, crimson, purple, pale yellow, slate blue, black and white that invites the viewer in for a deep dive.
Jerry Michalak, Lisa Van Vertloh, Tom Sarrantonio, Ann Haaland, Pablo Shine and Lynn Herring are among the local artists whose work currently comprises “Re(Wired),” though the mix will keep changing until it becomes safe once again to mount a one-person exhibition and have a real social gathering for its opening. Tiny landscape oils by Joyce Washor, whom Melikyan terms “a contemporary Old Master,” will constitute the next “One-Wall Show,” he says. With hotels beginning to open again on a limited basis, he’s also gradually reviving his long-running series of pop-up exhibits at Mohonk Mountain House.
Located at 11 Mohonk Road in High Falls, about a quarter-mile off Route 213, the Wired Gallery is now open on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. “We’re getting far fewer people than before, a lot of them weekenders or second-homeowners,” the gallerist reports. “But maybe one in four will walk away with something.”
To learn more, visit www.thewiredgallery.com or www.facebook.com/wiredgallery.
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