2021 Mohawk-hudson Regional
Well-crafted works, diversity, deft selections offer invitation
Albany Center Gallery show offers a variety of works that beckon.
Though you shouldn’t be touching the art, everything in the current “Invitational” at Albany Center Gallery beckons. And this is not just about the idiosyncratic toy-like sculptures in three dimensions by Kingsley Parker, actual wood and cloth and wire. The layered portraits by Daesha Devón Harris with their almost subliminal texts in glass, and the works on paper by Peggy Reeves have surfaces and materials that give them glimmers of that fugitive art gallery thing called aura.
Not that many of us have been inside an art gallery lately. But here you go. You can safely explore the curated works of three artists plucked from dozens in the 2021 Mohawk-hudson Regional. This is, certainly, a beautiful show. It looks good partly because the works are well crafted. And it coheres as a group despite the diversity of intentions, thanks to deft selections by the gallery’s director, Tony Iadicicco.
Just the words well crafted might make the art sound stodgy to some, but not so. Parker’s works do point to the past — little wooden fishing boats and ramshackle buildings are key to his models — but there are also implications about the changing world of tomorrow, and the loss of something tangible today in the larger ecosystem.
The best is a row of hanging sculptures where fishing boats are suspended above funnelshaped nets, as if getting caught themselves. They might feel like models you’d find in a smalltown museum, quaint and expert in a folksy way — that’s certainly their charm — but Parker makes them just surreal and off-kilter enough to click. The dire implications for these boats, and the lifestyles they represent, give the work its punch.
Nostalgia, pure and simple, permeates Harris’ many vivid works. For each, the artist began with a 19th-century studio portrait and made a larger transparency of it that she floated in a body of water outside, adding
natural elements and creating an aqueous still life that she photographed. This then is finished with rich color and mounted in a shallow shadow box to make what seems, deceptively, to be part collage and part hand-colored portraiture.
Key to all of these is the picturing and seeing of Black subjects. As much as Harris re-envisions their plain poses into decorative arrangements filled with leaves and warm color, we always zero in on the face, the person, the
long-gone subject who conjures up both a vague connection and a visceral distance.
Maybe the prettiest works here are the various designerly pieces by Reeves. Some are derived from the chemigram process: applying substances onto photographic paper so that the darkroom chemicals can’t develop and fix in the normal way. Photographic imagery, along with direct textural qualities from the applied materials and related chemical effects, works to create the final ambiguous, becoming surfaces.
Beauty and prettiness are very different things,
and Reeves in all her varied work has a great feeling for complex, visually irregular surface effects that are, to me, very pretty. Your eyes are happy to look. And there is a wonderful range here, playing with somewhat novel and often wonderfully complex results in far-flung ways.
Reeves suggests in her statement that the “dense labyrinthian topography” in two of them relates to immigrants seeking refuge at the Southern border. I believe it, of course, but I didn’t feel these issues were embedded and available in the works in the gallery.
But this intention does reveal a common thread in the Invitational, one found in a lot of contemporary art: Social issues and ecological and personal dramas are the impetus for art that carries these notions far beyond literal simplicity. In the best of this invitational, a genuine melding of formal finesse and sincere social commentary has its sway.