Plunged into the dark recesses of winter,
once again it seems that much of the local art scene has gone into hibernation.
There are still a few things to go see,
if you don't mind braving the cold and the occasional blizzard—
there's a great-looking photography show in the Berkshires,
for example (more on that later)—but in the meantime,
it seems like an appropriate moment to trot out my exceedingly lucid crystal ball,
with some art world predictions for 2006.
1. Eeo Stubblefield of Mount Tremper will choreograph a staggeringly beautiful and deeply resonant performance piece that finally unlocks the buried cosmic energy center located just outside of Woodstock. This event will lead to the immediate outbreak of total world peace.
2. A great deal of landscape painting will be made in the Hudson Valley. Some of it will be very good, a great deal of it will be terrible. You will need to look at it and decide for yourself which category it belongs to.
3. Dia:Beacon will remain blissfully ignorant of all artists who live and work in the Hudson Valley, unless their work was previously exhibited at the Venice Biennale, or has appeared in the pages of Artforum.
4. Sam Sebren of Athens will create a disturbing installation piece that includes an audio track that subliminally deprograms Scientologists and Masons. An ingenious hacker will secretly duplicate Sam's audiotape, uploading it as a podcast to the Internet, thereby freeing the universe of occultist hegemony. Total world peace will break out immediately.
5. The international art world will suddenly turn its back on conceptualism in art, largely because pure thought is difficult to sell at Art Basel Miami Beach. The earth will continue to turn on its axis.
6. Ed Butler will close the Wright Gallery in Kingston, in order to reopen as a 24/7 drop-in music studio. The bar will remain unchanged, and the store next door will still sell guns. The vibes generated during jam sessions will be felt as far as Hudson.
7. Donald Rumsfeld will enlist Matthew Barney and Jeff Koons in his ongoing efforts to thoroughly confuse the American people, while conning them into continuing the war in Iraq. This initiative will fail when their collaborative sculpture, a life-size bust of George W. Bush cast in Vaseline, melts under the television lights at its debut press conference.
8. Carl van Brunt will apply his Buddhist charm to the promotion of The New Hudson movement at his gallery in Beacon, and elsewhere. Good artists and good people throughout the valley will rejoice, and total instant karma will break out spontaneously around the world.
9. Creative workers of all types—artists, writers, musicians, etc.—will be paid in a manner more properly reflecting their contributions to society. Painters will receive salaries equivalent to CEOs, and the Wall Street financial industry will be supplanted by the creation of real things, rather than the shuffling of balance sheets.
10. If you spend just one hour a month going out to look at art in the Hudson Valley, by the end of 2006, you will find at least six particular works that you will want to take home and enjoy forever. (That's a .500 batting average!)
 Shepherd, Juan Garcia-Nunez, palladium print, 2004 |
A reflection of this state of affairs can be seen in the photography show now on view at the Haddad Lascano Gallery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Curator Ramon Lascano has brought together a number of very disparate photographers, most of them operating in or near the Berkshires or the Hudson Valley. From the straightforward, yet hauntingly beautiful gelatin-silver prints of Yvette Lucas, to Krysha Andrews's starkly graphic, digitally generated color work, it's apparent that photography has evolved to include a multitude of possible approaches and processes.
The most unusual artist in the show is Juan Garcia-Nuñez. He creates his own negatives, by painting the image on a sheet of plexiglass, in what you might call a precise, photo-realist style. His subjects are usually offbeat (such as his wife in a hazmat suit), but the most fascinating aspect of the work is, perhaps, his ability to reverse the tones so precisely—as with any other photographic negative, the printing process inverts the values, so that a dark area on the negative becomes light on the print, and vice versa. He then contact-prints these invented negatives using the luxurious platinum/palladium process, applying the emulsion to beautifully textured French watercolor paper. The resulting print is displayed alongside its plexiglass negative, which becomes its uncanny twin.
Other interesting selections include Harold Washburn's photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge from the 1960s (which have never been shown before), H. David Stein's meticulous color close-ups of amazing details from nature, and Joseph Squillante's black-and-white images documenting the Hudson River. If you can make it out through the snow drifts before the 15th, a visit to this show should reward the effort.