Seth David Rubin’s Fractured Potraits

Four of the artists featured in the exhibit “Here Now: Contemporary Photographers of the Hudson Valley” at the Kleinert/James Center for Arts have been featured on the cover of this magazine: Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Tim Davis, Pete Mauney, and Jeffrey Milstein. Seeing the show was like meeting up with old friends: Milstein’s Crayola-colored airplanes, Blackwood’s nature photos with humans hovering just out of frame, Davis’s eye for the absurd in the mundane, Mauney’s fascination with long exposures at night.

The fractured prints of Seth David Rubin are a delightful discovery. The most formally intriguing pieces in the show, Rubin’s deconstructions of portraiture—he arranges mirrors on location—blur the line between the fictitious and the real, questioning what is actually “real” about photographs themselves.

The exhibit, curated by Jane Hart, is a clever gathering of acclaimed (Andrew Moore) and emerging (Ryan Rusiecki) Hudson Valley photo-based contemporary artists who employ various approaches and techniques to tell stories that reflect our present moment. Other artists participating in “Here Now” will likely be well known to our readers: Sharon Core, Phyllis Galembo, Lyle Ashton Harris, Marvin Heiferman, Dana Hoey, Carmen Lizardo, Tanya Marcuse, Qiana Mestrich, Carla Rhodes, and Oliver Wasow. The exhibit will be on display through September 24 in Woodstock.

This article appears in September 2023.