Regionalism once meant a peculiarly concentrated kind of art—work produced in and by a community largely sheltered from outside influence, reflecting some particular local character. But what would it mean to think something like "regionalism after globalization"?

To quote Yeats, "The center will not hold." New York has quickly metamorphosed into a place that's more about selling art than making it. As pointed out in a recent article on artinfo.com, up-and-coming artists, who once flocked to the city for its cosmopolitan atmosphere, cheap industrial loft space and high-density artistic camaraderie, can no longer afford to live there. With average rent on a one-bedroom apartment approaching $2,500 a month, who can spare the time off from the frame shop (or the restaurant, or the office temp job) to squander time making work that may or may not sell?

Which brings us back to the growing New Regionalism—especially here in the Hudson Valley, with its easy proximity to the city. Hundreds of artists, some born and raised here, others graduates of the art schools dotting the river who never left (or left and came back), and increasingly, artists who long for the lower overhead, the bigger spaces, and the less congested environment of upstate, have come to call the Hudson Valley home. Still at times marked by the particularity of this place (landscape is still one of the more popular genres), this New Regionalism is equally informed by cultural debates in broader society, a situation enabled by the new, omnipresent information technologies of the media, old and new.

Patrick Taberna, Sibenik, 2002

And so there's plenty of artistic activity up here now, lots of artists to work and show together, in a critical mass that once was restricted to the big city. Proof positive of the scope and depth of this New Regionalism can be found in an exhibition on view through May 21 at Haddad-Lascano Gallery in Great Barrington, titled simply Gender. Artist/curator Richard Britell has assembled a diverse group of artists to address this incredibly broad and complex topic, and the whole enterprise engages both art and ideas on a level that competes with any similar sort of  "concept show" I've seen in for-profit galleries in Chelsea.

Terry Rowlett, The Couple, 2006

Part of the new post-globalization dynamic (aka postmodernism) involves the fact that there are no really new formal developments left to be made in art—that in a sense, everything is up for grabs, each and every time somebody picks up a paintbrush or a camera or a chisel. This state of affairs is quite evident in Gender, as each of the 18 participating artists contributes a different approach, a different vision to the subject at hand. From Audrey Francis's deeply personal (and fearless) painterly abstractions of her own body, to Anne Arden McDonald's metaphorically rich photographic self-portrait (of herself pushing fruitlessly against a stone wall in Hungary), both the subjective and objective poles of representation and reality come into play.

Carol Schulze wittily restages Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's painting of the Valpinçon bather—a coolly exotic number, revealing her sensuously curved back to the viewer—by photographing a broad-backed male model in the same pose, with the same Orientalist turban wrapped around his head. The performative nature of gender itself becomes the theme in such work, as we come to understand the masquerade we stage each day in simply presenting our Self to the world.

The presentation of the world, on the other hand, is the gist of what photographer Patrick Taberna's work is all about. Or rather, the world as it presents itself to him, as he passes through from one place to another. Prints first published in Taberna's book Au fil des jours (roughly translated, A String of Days) will be on view at his first American exhibition at Galerie BMG in Woodstock, starting May 12.

It may seem odd to feature a French photographer in a column otherwise concerned with promoting the New Regionalism, but it's precisely the freedom of movement and openness to expressive possibility embodied in Taberna's work that beats at the heart of this notion. The fact that such an international figure can make his American debut here, rather than at one of the high-end galleries in New York, helps to make the point indelibly.

Taberna uses photography to frame interesting moments, and ultimately implicit, condensed stories, from people, places, and things that he encounters in his travels. As he puts it, "I do not want to be a photographer who travels, but rather a traveler who makes photos." Frustrated in his desire to be a writer, he turned to photography to express himself, and has quite successfully found his voice through his pictures. Shot on film in medium format (using an old Russian plastic camera), he scans the negatives and has the images printed digitally, using pigmented inks on high quality papers, often using lush color, idiosyncratic cropping, and moody, atmospheric lighting to condense the scene before him into the visual equivalent of a well-crafted short story.

Passing from one day into the next, from one place to another, Taberna seems to be searching for whatever provisional bits of meaning he can find—knowing that final answers of any sort are improbable at best, and not to be trusted in any event. When asked by an interviewer, "Have you gotten from photography what you hoped you would?" he responded, "I do not think I have reached anywhere in photography. If one day I do, I would, maybe, have to do something else. I often question my work and I constantly look for something I cannot grasp onto. It is this quest that keeps me going."

Knowing where we have come from is not the same as knowing where we will end up. This idea of the New Regionalism is not intended as a prescriptive formula for artworld, but rather a descriptive analysis of what has already come to pass, a way to recognize the current state of affairs. I look forward to the continuously unfolding story of art and culture here in the Mid-Hudson Valley—the traces of which you can follow here in Chronogram on a monthly basis—because it is a story without a definitive ending, an endless array of possibilities that continue to emerge and flourish in places I could scarcely have predicted just a year ago. Like Taberna, I'm in it for the quest.