ArtBeat: What To See

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Rewilderment: Passing Through the Veil Between Worlds @ MCLA Gallery 51, North Adams. Exploring themes of ritual, witchcraft, hybridity and mediumistic practices, this show of collaborative and solo work by Sarah Falkner, Shannon Taggart and Ryder Cooley includes drawings, altars, spirit photography, video, performance residue and artifacts.

The Rewilderment collaboration began as a series of performance rituals created by Cooley and Falkner in 2011. Through this collaboration, the artists created videos, costumes, mystical symbols, tattoos and performance works, working in a number of significant sites including burial grounds, swamps and gardens. They also worked with a variety of elements such as poison ivy, goats, rabbits, gingerbread houses and animal relics. In 2012, Falkner and Cooley began a collaboration with Taggart, a photographer, who since has documented a number of their performative actions.

A selection of these photographs will be on display, along with props, objects and residue from the rituals. According to Cooley, Rewilderment draws inspiration from fairy tales, remote viewing experiments, spirit communications, lunar navigations and dowsing. The project as a whole sets forth to create hypnotic triggers as gateways for otherworldly phenomena.

After the opening reception for Rewilderment: Passing Through the Veil between Worlds, MCLA Presents! will team up with DownStreet Art for a special Music Macabre, an All Hallows Eve event with live music, projections, costumes, taxidermy and other phenomena featuring Ryder & Hazel with the Dust Bowl Faeries and experimental dream-pop from Shana Falana at the Branch Gallery, at 18 Holden St. (around the corner from MCLA Gallery 51)

Reception: October 31, 6-8pm.
Concert: Thursday, October 31, 8-10pm. ($10 general admission, $5 for those in costumes/MCLA faculty & staff. MCLA students are free!)
(Through December 1)

The Black Velvet Art Party @ dockside aboard the Lake George Steamboat Company’s Lac du St. Sacrement, Lake George. This annual celebration, now in its 25th year, is renowned for its out-of-the-ordinary presentation of black velvet art and over-the-top apparel. The party features a silent auction of original black velvet art, a limbo contest, art and fashion awards and dance music with The Bad Chaperones. A typical year will have over forty black velvet art entries available to bid on and take home. This year’s theme is “Shine!” Tickets are $25.00 and are available at the door. Cash bar. Proceeds help fund the Lake George Arts Project and its gallery exhibition series. Saturday, November 2, 7-11pm.

Storytellers and Conjurers @ Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson. Works by Kahn & Selesnick, Eileen Murphy, Louise Laplante, Adam Cohen and Claire Lofrese. Artists’ reception: Saturday, November 2, 6-8pm. (Through December 8)

They Dance For Rain @ The Lichtenstein Center For The Arts (Facebook), Pittsfield. Since January of 2012, They Dance For Rain has brought Tap shoes and the art form of Tap Dance to people with an interest and need for this unique kind of artistic self-expression. This exhibit features photographs, videos and stories from dancer Stefanie Weber and photographer Monika Pizzichemi’s 2013 residency in Nairobi. Opening reception: Friday November 1, 5-8pm (First Fridays ArtsWalk) (Through November 30)

Charcoal! @ Schick Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs. Works by David Nash, Dozier Bell, Dragna Crnjak, Maggie Evans, April Gornik, Ken Greenleaf, Scott Hunt, Susan Hauptman, Anthony Mitri, Emily Nelligan, Kate Ten Eyck and John Walker. Curated by Schick Gallery Director Paul Sattler in conjunction with the faculty gallery committee, the exhibit includes 33 drawings, three sculptures, and one installation created on site. The works represent a wide range of styles and subject matter, from moody interiors and atmospheric skyscapes to linear abstractions and figurative pieces that suggest mysterious but compelling narratives. Opening reception: Friday, November 1, 5:30-7:30pm. Artists’ talk with Kate Ten Eyck and Scott Hunt: 6:30-7:30 pm. (Through December 16)

David Grainger: Polarized Landscapes @ The Foundry for Art Design + Culture, Cohoes. Watercolor drawings, collages, and sculpture by David Grainger. Among the collages are portraits of individuals that seem encased in ice and suspended in abstracted seascapes, works in which Grainger mines a polar terrain for images at once abstract and figurative, political and absurd. Artist reception: Saturday, November 2, 6-9pm. Artist lecture: Sunday, December 1, 1pm. (Through December 1)

Dmitri Freund: Emerging Light @ Good Purpose Gallery, Lee. Expressionist works by Russian-American painter Dmitri Freund. Also on display are Nina Evan’s painted glass tables. Reception: Saturday, November 2, 6-8pm. (Through January 2)

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John Lees: Painting @ John Davis Gallery, Hudson. Paintings by John Lees, sculpture by Deborah Masters, installation and drawing by Gillian Jagger, paintings by Sara Jane Roszak, Janice Nowinski and Dale Emmart. (Through November 3)

Pattern: familiar & unfamiliar @ Sorelle Gallery, Albany. New works by David Hill and Christine Averill-Green. (Through November 3)

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American Storytellers: Brian Cirmo, Jill Shoffiett @ SCAC Arts Center Gallery, Saratoga Springs. Based on childhood memory and fantasy, Jill Shofiett depicts scenes of an imaginary south – an escape to a private, delirious utopia. From re-purposed washing machines, homemade roller coasters, weather-beaten structures and the general detritus of daily life in rural America, she creates a narrative about industrious, embattled creators who are inventing a curious, isolated world in which they inhabit.

Influenced by American history, literature and music, Brian Cirmo creates an environment where the protagonist, inebriated from whiskey, war and solitariness, loses all sense of time in a dystopian landscape while searching for the meaning of being American. (Through November 9)

Shapeshifter @ Thompson Giroux Gallery, Chatham. Works by Benigna Chilla, Jeanette Fintz, Mona Mark and D. Jack Solomon. (Through November 10)

The Wonder Verified and Fulfilled @ BCB Art, Hudson. New paintings by Musho Rodney Alan Greenblat, who notes they are “a product of my fascination with Buddhist imagery and reflect my limited understanding of Zen, to whatever limit it can be understood. These serious matters are then blended with brightly colored cartoon craziness, and what emerges is just my way of looking at the world. Also on display will be a group show featuring gallery artists: Ching Ho Cheng, Barbara Friedman, Bill Seaman, Erik Hanson, Garth Evans, Will Pflaum, Eric Rhein, Ed Smith and others. (Through November 10)

Carla Shapiro: Memory and Longing and Kate Sterlin: Family @ Davis Orton Gallery, Hudson. Carla Shapiro uses found photographs, scanning them and altering them digitally, prints them in platinum/palladium and then adds paper, fabric and bric-a-brac to their surfaces to create a collaged effect. Carla Shapiro works in black and white including documentary street photography and intimate portraiture. Also on display: portfolio showcases by Andi Schreiber and Shane Welch.(Through November 10)

What the Trees Say: Saratoga’s Changing Treescapes @ The Spring Street Gallery, Saratoga Springs. Works by Anne Diggory from 1977 to 2013 that focus on the treescapes of Saratoga Springs. Inspired by the Urban Forestry Project of Sustainable Saratoga, Diggory has taken a fresh look at a subject matter that interested her over thirty years ago and intermittently during the years in between. The exhibition juxtaposes the new works with a large body of paintings from her early years and images of what those scenes look like today. Gallery talk: Saturday, October 5, 2pm. (Through November 16)

A World of Prints: Selections from the Union College Permanent Collection @ Mandeville Gallery, Schenectady. Prints from the 15th to the 20th century featuring works by Josef Albers, Paul Cézanne, Adriaen Collaert, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Honoré Daumier, Francisco José de Goya, Joe Goode, Robert Graham, David Hockney, Oskar Kokoschka, Lee Krasner, Roy Lichtenstein, Edouard Manet, Jean-François Millet, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Francesco Piranesi, Ken Price, Joseph Raffael, Edward Ruscha, Frank Stella, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and Michael Wolgemut. A variety of subjects are included, both abstract and representational, demonstrating a number of techniques including etching, engraving, lithography, screen-printing and woodcut. (Through November 17)

Reality of Placement @ Union College Atrium, Schenectady. An exhibition of contemorary Latin America art that addresses the conditions and circumstances that are relevant to the experiences of migration globally and the people, ideas and objects that pass from one culture to another. Exhibiting artists include: Alain Gutierrez, Carlos Barberena, Carlos Solis, Dio-Genes Abreu, Ismael Checo, karen Macher, Jamie Rodriguez, Lssette Solorzano, Alexis Mendoza, Anthony Montes, Patricia Henriquez, Jesus Rivera, Miguel Lescano, Luis Stephenberg, Ramon Peralta, Roxanna Melendez, Xavier Figueroa. (Through November 22)

A Show Heads @ Limner Gallery, Hudson. The Limner’s annual portraiture exhibition is a large group show in a wide-ranging styles and media. (Through November 24)

Damn Your Eyes @ ArtCentric Gallery, Troy. New paintings by Dylan L.L.. (Through November 25)

A Splash of Color: Paintings by Willie Marlowe @ Carmen’s Café, Troy. Willie Marlowe’s vibrant abstract paintings, curated by Jim Lewis. Artist’s reception: September 19, 5-8pm. (Through November 25)

Robert Moylan – Paintings from his 50th Year @ Clement Art Gallery, Troy. Robert Moylan’s landscapes are brightly colored celebrations, in the tradition of the Hudson River School, of the rural beauty of Rensselaer and Washington counties. (Through November 30)

Jane Dickson: Out of Here – Paintings 1999-2013 @ Art Omi, Ghent. An exhibition of five large-scale oil paintings on Astroturf by New York based artist Jane Dickson. Utilizing a cinematic depth of field, along with a heightened palette, distant perspective and low horizon to emphasize the immensity of sky, Dickson’s “Out of Here” paintings manifest existential melancholy, as well as a sense of quiet solitude. (Through November 30)

Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 @ Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown. An exhibition that examines a pioneering group of black artists whose work and connections with other artists of varied ethnic backgrounds helped shape the creative output of Southern California, featuring approximately 140 works by thirty-three artists including Melvin Edwards, Fred Eversley, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Alonzo Davis, Dale Brockman Davis, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar and Charles White.(Through December 1)

72 Degrees: L.A. Art from the Collection @ Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown. Work by artists in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s. Forging various West Coast aesthetics that included assemblage, Finish Fetish, and Conceptualism, these artists departed from traditional modes of representation by exploring materials in new ways. Artists featured in the show include Edward Kienholz, George Herms, Wallace Berman, Robert Heinecken, Ed Moses, Helen Pashgian, Ken Price, Peter Voulkos, Maren Hassinger, Richard Diebenkorn, Vija Celmins, and Ed Ruscha. (Through December 1)

Alan Siegel Works @ Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock. Working in many artistic disciplines, blurring the lines between high art and functionality. Alan Siegel has made sculpture, paintings, furniture, drawings, constructions, designed magical houses–plus hybrids of all of these. (Through December 1)

Zohar Lazar @ Hudson Opera House. An exhibition of drawings by illustrator Zohar Lazar, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and numerous other publications. (Through December 7)

Field Elevations: Works by Ed Osborn @ HVCC Teaching Gallery, Troy. Finnish-born installation artist Ed Osborn, originally trained as a composer in traditional music, moved into art in the early 1990s and produced a body work in many forms of electronic media. In “Field Elevations,” Osborn uses low-tech gadgetry to create sculptures that can be activated to make sounds and evoke experiences that come from our everyday lives. (Through December 7)

Charlotta Westergren: Progeny @ Esther Massry Gallery, Albany. Paintings on linen, lamé and aluminum,works on paper and video works that examine our relationship with time and the increasing difficulty of stopping and slowing it in the modern age. (Through December 8)

Kate Gilmore: A Tisket, A Tasket and Suzanne McClelland: Furtive Gesture_CEDEpart2 @ University Art Museum, Albany. As the sole protagonist in her performative videos, Kate Gilmore struggles to overcome absurd and manufactured challenges – climbing out of holes, jumping rope in heels, squeezing out of tight spots, using her body to explore physical limits and social norms. Suzanne McClelland is best known for incorporating language with vivid abstract compositions. Riffing off the word cede and its homonym seed, McClelland’s hybrid presentation considers the many ways in which power shifts, separates, and grows. (Through December 14)

VETS: Portraits of Veterans of War @ Spencertown Academy Arts Center. Pittsfield resident Bill Wright, a veteran of Desert Storm/Shield, exhibits this deeply personal series of portraits of US veterans. Opening reception, catered by Culinary Command, a nonprofit program created by local Chef David Robinson for retooling and retraining veterans and active U.S. military for careers in food, restaurant, hotel and hospitality industries: (Through December 15)

An Armory Show @ The Opalka Gallery, Albany. The 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York City, now simply referred to as “The Armory Show,” introduced America to Modernism. 100 years later, this exhibition by Michael Oatman and Kenneth Ragsdale investigates the dynamic changes that occurred in the art world in general as a result of its occurrence, and the history of its effect on the artistic life of the Capital Region. A salon, an exhibition within the installation, will include the work of over 40 artists from the region. (Through December 15)

Haim Steinbach: Once Again The World Is Flat @ CSC Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson. An exhibition of a number of the artist’s grid-based paintings from the early 1970s, as well as a series of reconfigured historical installations and major new works created in relation to a selection of works drawn from the Marieluise Hessel Collection. The artworks in the exhibition span Steinbach’s forty-year career. (Through December 20)

Helen Marten: No borders in a wok that can’t be crossed @ CSC Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson. Helen Marten has created a group of works in diverse media – from sculptures to wall pieces and videos – in a comprehensive installation including many new works created specifically for the CCS Bard exhibition. (Through December 20)

2×2 Collective: double consciousness @ The Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy. A collaboration of four artists: Ben Altman, Maria Driscoll McMahon, Sandra Stephens and guest artist Carla Rae Johnson. Working with the gallery space in both traditional and non-traditional ways, the artists find common ground in their uses of the figure at the intersections of the social, political and the personal. (Through December 21)

Opener 25: Hildur Asgeirsdottir Jonsson @ The Tang Teaching Museum and Gallery, Saratoga Springs. Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson explores the overlap between painting and textile with shimmering paintings on woven silk thread. Often monumental in scale, her work takes its imagery from a range of sources, including brain scans, celestial objects, and most frequently, her native Icelandic landscape. (Through December 29)

Curator’s Summer 2013 Choice @ Chace Randall Gallery, Andes. Works by Keith Cardwell, Christie Scheele, Inverna Lockpez, Grant Collier, Judith Lamb, Rimer Cardillo and Michael Rich. (Through December 29)

2013 Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region @ The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls. One of the oldest regionals in the country, this year the show is comprised of work by 75 artists selected by juror Dan Cameron. (Through December 29)

In conjunction with this exhibition, the Artists of the Mohawk Hudson Region Annex Show will open at The Shirt Factory, Glens Falls with an artists’ reception Friday, October 11, 8-10pm. (Through November 2) Also on display at The Hyde Collection: The Window Project, an installation consisting of eleven windows transformed into painted and assembled works of art by area youth, ages 16-21. (Through December 31)

Russel Wright: The Nature of Design @ New York State Museum, Albany. An exhibition featuring the work and philosophy of renowned industrial designer Russel Wright, exploring his career from the 1920s through the 1970s and including approximately 40 objects along with photographs and design sketches. (Through December 31)

Clark Remix @ The Clark, Williamstown. A salon-style installation of works from The Clark’s permanent collection, including some 80 paintings, 20 sculptures and 300 examples of decorative arts. Visitors will be able to create their own “curatorial remix” of the collection through an interactive project called uCurate, available in the gallery and on the Clark’s website and can then submit them to a gallery that will be featured at clarkart.edu. The Clark’s curatorial team will regularly review the submissions, and will select the best of these for exhibitions that will be presented at the Clark. (Through Jan. 1, 2014)

Love to Love You @ MASS MoCA, North Adams. An exhibition that brings together artists who explore fandom as a unique opportunity for shared social experience and extreme personal obsession, presenting fans not as passive spectators but active participants in culture. Whether making memorabilia, writing fan fiction, or singing karaoke, fans become creators as much as consumers of culture; by looking at the social culture of fandom, this exhibition poses questions about authorship, collectivity, and our place in the hierarchy of cultural production. Participating artists include Mark Bennett, Eric Doeringer, Elissa Goldstone, Jason Lazarus, Eva LeWitt, Patrick McDonough and Jeremy Shaw. (Through January 5)

Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney @ Arkell Museum, Canajoharie. The exhibition features Gurney’s original artwork used to illustrate the Dinotopia book series. (Through February 9)

Nude @ Sohn Fine Art Gallery, Stockbridge. Photography and mixed media in a broad range of styles by John Atchley, Peggy Braun, John Clarke, Greg Gorman, Eric Korenman, Hildy Kronen, Jack Krove, Mona Mark, Matuschka, Irmari Nacht, Lincoln Russell, Cassandra Sohn and Savannah Spirit. (Through February)

Big and Bold: Contemporary Paintings, Collage, and Sculpture from the Albany Institute’s Collection @ Albany Institute of History & Art. Paintings by Leigh Wen and Susan Stuart, collage by Michael Oatman and sculpture by Sharon Bates are a few of the works selected for the inaugural exhibition of the Institute’s newly renovated Lansing Gallery. (Through March 2)

Jason Middlebrook @ MASS MoCA, North Adams. For the past decade, Jason Middlebrook has been exploring the complex relationship between man and nature in his sculptures, installations, paintings and large-scale drawings. Responding to the unusual scale of MASS MoCA’s gallery, the artist will be working with planks that in some instances reach tree-like heights, while others will retain a human scale. Middlebrook will also debut a new monumental mobile that will function like a fountain within the gallery. Titled Falling Water after Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Kaufman residence, the work continues the artist’s exploration of manufactured nature while adding a twist to Wright’s notions of living in harmony with the environment. (Through April 7)

Joseph Montgomery: Five Sets Five Reps @ Mass Moca, North Adams. New York-based painter Joseph Montgomery creates compact abstract assemblages (many measuring only 12 x 10 inches) by layering a range of materials — a base vocabulary of sorts — including wood, clay, cardboard, fiberglass, paper, and wire. These elements take on the appearance of painterly gesture, each functioning like a brushstroke. The earliest of these works developed from the artist’s attempts to veil or destroy paintings which he found too earnest or too personal. These rejected works become a support for his subsequent collages and are at times cannibalized as material fragments in newer works. (Through April 7)

Guillaume Leblon @ MASS MoCA, North Adams. This first solo exhibition of Paris-based sculptor Guillaume Leblon’s work in a U.S. museum will feature a selection of works made over the last decade, in addition to two major new projects created for MASS MoCA. While his works refuse a single reading, they often conjure images of the ruin and the passage of time, bringing the present and the past into contact. Leblon can transform everyday components into sculptures that attain a relic-like quality or the aura of a classical statue.. (Through April 7)

The Mystery of the Albany Mummies @ Albany Institute of History and Art. An investigation of two ancient Egyptian mummies and their coffins, one dating from the 21st Dynasty and the other from the Ptolemaic Period, acquired by the Institute in 1909. (Through June 8, 2014)

Anselm Kiefer @ MASS MoCA, North Adams. MASS MoCA opens a 10,000 square-foot building devoted to the art of Anselm Kiefer. The exhibition will include Étroits sont les Vaisseaux (Narrow are the Vessels), an 82-foot long, undulating wave-like sculpture made of cast concrete, exposed rebar, and lead; The Women of the Revolution (Les Femmes de la Revolution) , comprised of more than twenty lead beds with photographs and wall text; Velimir Chlebnikov , a steel pavilion containing 30 paintings dealing with nautical warfare and inspired by the quixotic theories of the Russian mathematical experimentalist Velimir Chlebnikov; and a new, large-format commission created by the artist specifically for the installation at MASS MoCA.