By William Jaeger
Special to the Times Union
Copyright 1997, Times Union, Albany, New York
The "1997 Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region Juried Exhibition" is exactly what a Regional should be. It is diverse, beautiful, interesting and contemporary. And most of all, it is representative, a true cross-section of the artistic activity in the area.
With some 100 works by 70 artists, the large space at the University Art Museum at the University at Albany has surprisingly little filler, and clearly juror Dan Cameron embraced every genre. The art runs from almost avant garde (nothing terribly radical here) to well-crafted and gorgeous, and includes newcomers alongside veterans. The show excludes only a handful of the area's most successful or comfortable artists who no longer bother to enter this kind of exhibition, but that is just as well, for this show doesn't need them.
There is no logical place to begin, so you might look at one of the many realistic, depictive works, such as David Arsenault's oil painting of the Jericho Drive-In caught just after dusk. The title, "The Big Picture," is intentionally a pun and it is also the name of the movie on the billboard marquee. Behind a few trees on the large outdoor screen, glowing in the blue twilight, a tacky ad for hot dogs and Coke incites the question whether this is pure nostalgia or a critique of commercialism.
Ted Lind's garish painting of four men heading into a bar at night suggests a contemporary Manhattan street scene populated by the tough men of a Peckinpah Western. Is this a real place painted with heightened theatricality, or is this an illustration of a fictional world? Lind's is just one of many works that depend not on representing reality, but in upsetting it for their success.
Sandy Scolnik's funny/sad "Self Portrait as Quadruplets," for example, is brilliantly understated and surreal, the four identical women lined up like Diane Arbus oddities.
Certainly Leigh Li-Yun Wen's 6-by-12-foot painting at the top of the stairs suggests actual ocean waves, but the work is a stylized design about motion and indeterminancy. The water practically moves before your eyes. This is all done with thin lines that meander from left to right, hundreds of them, scratched through a dark overlayer to let their fierce yellow electricity burst through. Compare this to Robert W. Bode's water surfaces, painted in large wavy bands of blue, white and dark green, making motionless the gently broken reflections of a quiet pool.
All but one of the photographically based works in the show depart from typically purist photographic representation. Digital manipulations, images projected within scenes, photo emulsions applied to alternative surfaces such as plastic silverware, and photocollage are all shown.
Even Jeri Lynn Eiseberg's two small, conventional black-and-white views of old stone architectural details of Alcatraz are so texturally rich, they no longer speak about the original subject, but draw the viewer to their abstracted silvery surfaces.
It is perhaps in the most heavily symbolic and playful works that we see the most adventurous art. John Loy's funny, brightly colored painting, "Yaba Daba Doo" looks like a blowup of a Fred Flintstone comic that was broken into several large pieces and reassembled out of whack.
In a similar vein, look for Mark Miller's "Cloud Drawing" series in its comic perfection.
Leigh Ann Smith's small, elegantly framed painting is more like a high-brow New Yorker cartoon. It shows a black poodle posed like a grand dame in a lavender overstuffed chair, and her stylish, bourgeois ennui is hysterically funny, heightened by the partially eaten box of chocolates next to her.
Susie Brandt's white square quilt with small red letters neatly embroidered over most of its surface doesn't seem like much at first, but the words, which start in the middle and form a square spiral outward, describe everything Brandt ate for a year, day by day, in exact order. Every entry begins with coffee and varies from there. You aren't expected to read it all, just marvel at her fastidious bookkeeping and needlepointing over something so mundane.
More deliberately profound are works like Deborah Zlotsky's dark, glassy-surfaced surrealist view of a cup, some fruit, a polyhedron and so on floating in front of an ominous brown sphere that seems to be unfolding and dissolving before your eyes.
A similar foreboding appears in Rob Longley's dark, gray, partially blurred view of an overpass against the sky, called "From a Post-Futurist Manifesto." And Fumiko Shido's "Lamentation" looks like the post-future itself, the earth hot and charred, the sun a heavy yellow, with vaguely defined figures cowering in dark boxes scattered across the broad desert.
Sculpture makes a bold appearance in many guises. Often, the objects appear to be something they are not. Most dazzling, surely, is a life-size canvas airplane which is not a plane, hanging from one wall. Called "Suit for Flying," artist Evan Reed suggests that the cockpit, lined as it is with soft olive-drab cloth, is a vessel for a body, with the plane a natural appendage. Despite this, the whole looks curiously like an exhibit from the State Museum, or like a giant crucifix waiting for a body.
William R. Bergman's "In Time" places a square tank of water over a toy train that runs endlessly in a circle, the water altering our sense of depth so that the train looks as though it is submerged.
Kate Springnether's "Baby on a Bed of Moss" looks at first like a large brown egg on a patch of grass held on a skinny pedestal, but the egg is slightly stretched and curved to suggest a sleeping animal, an oddly disturbing effect.
A table covered with 130 white paper bags filled with popcorn alternately labeled "despair" and "desire" by Richard Garrison ambiguously suggests a movie theater and the emotional expectations it raises. In each bag is a variation of cheap 3-D glasses, with the word "seduction" printed on the blue eyepiece and "consumption" printed on the red one.
This bit of Hollywood brings us conveniently back to the drive-in where we started, both in this survey and in the gallery. It feels as if we've just been through a fast-paced movie. There are few works that are absolutely resolved and memorable, but that's OK. I'll take the rough edges of a show this interesting and convincing any day.