 Chad Kleitsch, Untitled (Blue Arch), 2002, digital c-print |
Once upon a time, this might have been a fairly accurate way of looking at things. Back in the day, when travel and communication were significantly more difficult, people in particular places developed their own art and craft traditions, cultural expressions of their own communities that often drew upon a shared ethnic or religious background, creating local/regional styles that were dependent upon a fairly small pool of artists to produce and develop them—that is, if there was enough critical mass in the community to have the time and resources to allow for such expression.
Then there's what happens when more worldly artists find inspiration in a particular place. There were the German Romantics, like Caspar David Friedrich, who became enchanted with the sublime, dizzying heights of the Alps; Paul Gauguin found a tropical groove in his travels to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, riffing on both the place and the indigenous Polynesian culture; closer to home, Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School artists responded to the natural beauty of our own area (just as the ravages of 19th-century industrialization were beginning to alter it) to produce ambitious works that were ultimately destined for exhibition—and greatness—in places like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
Today we live in a very different time. The Hudson Valley is no longer the pristine wilderness it once represented, and, thanks to the modern media of television and the Internet, no place is quite so far away from anyplace else anymore. Globalization has resulted in both the danger of homogenization, or a lack of difference between previously unique regions (think McDonald's and TV newscasters), but it's also created a demand—not to mention markets—for more unique, localized products, from microbrew beer to community-supported agriculture.
All of this gets translated a bit upside down in the artworld, which has become the home of a new, oxymoronically provincial cosmopolitanism. (Just try mentioning an exhibition anywhere "upstate" to a hardcore New York art type. They're more likely to have seen something in London or Berlin than anything outside the boundaries of the five boroughs in recent memory.) The radical imbalance of this situation is something that will inevitably be worked out over time, however. There's just too much excellent work being done outside the city, especially now that rents are so outrageous there, and vibrant arts communities have formed in places where a number of talented people have taken up residence—such as our own backyard.
The proof of this transformation of "regional" into "respectable" can be seen this month in the inaugural edition of the Regional Triennial of Photographic Arts on view at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. CPW is one of the regional institutions that has, over its 28-year history, grown to become an important piece of infrastructure for the artistic development of the Hudson Valley, a major crossroads for photographers of all stripes. In order to select work for the Triennial, nine professionals in the region—a group that included photographers, teachers, critics, curators, and museum people, among others—were each asked to submit the names of three worthy and engaging photographers. From the resulting list, nine were chosen for the exhibition, while the full group will be featured in the fall issue of CPW's magazine, the Photographic Quarterly.
The range and real quality of the work in the exhibition serve as a triumphant confirmation of the wealth of talent that the Hudson Valley has attracted over the years. The group includes Eric Lindbloom of Poughkeepsie, a resident of the area for three decades, and whose recent work continues to break fertile new ground; as well as Tim Davis from Tivoli, a fairly recent arrival who came to teach at a local college and immediately fell in love with the region.
The diversity of the exhibition extends to the various media used in the work as well. While still photography, both in color and black-and-white, makes up the bulk of the show, CPW's definition of the term "photographic" is fairly broad, including Zachary Powell's four-part video Ensori, which juxtaposes images from around the globe, as well as Olivia Robinson's cutting-edge "new media" interactive installation Oblivious, in which a sleeping, nude male reacts to the viewer's touch.
Likewise, the subject matter and approaches found in the exhibition range widely. Lindbloom's black-and-white Pinewoods landscapes focus on texture and form to an almost abstract degree, while Angelika Rinnhofer's rich color prints re-enact a series of Christian martyrs in the style of Baroque paintings. Perhaps the most well-known photographer in the show, Barbara Ess, has applied her signature pinhole camera technique to rephotographing an image of an ancient ziggurat that appeared in the New York Times, from an article describing archeological sites likely to be destroyed in our invasion of Iraq, bringing an overtly political message to the show.
The artists in the show live and/or work in a territory that reaches from Beacon in the south, up to the Capital District in the north (which, coincidentally, almost parallels the range of Chronogram's distribution). Make no mistake: What we are experiencing here, with such a profusion of real talent based throughout the Hudson Valley, is something truly noteworthy and exceedingly special. I predict that one day, in the not-so-distant future, people will speak about our very own contemporary art scene here with the same longing and reverent tones once reserved for, say, New York in the '50s, or Paris in the first decades of the 20th century. So don't just sit around, idly wishing that you were there—because you are!