The Edgewood Gallery’s new show Journeys Past and Present fulfills the promise suggested by the exhibition title. Indeed, the show references various journeys: travel, artists’ creative changes, the notion of personal renewal. It’s a four-artist exhibit featuring landscape photography, glassworks and jewelry. Jamie Young’s images depict scenes in a variety of locales including Green Lakes State Park, Iceland and Madison, Wis. The prints vary as well; they are blue-tinged cyanotypes, silver-gelatin prints and archival pigment inkjet photos. One constant is Young’s ability to create interesting, incisive images. In “Caught,” he portrays a lakeside scene in winter featuring a couple of snow-covered trees. “RIP,” meanwhile, captures a sky lit up by a storm and striking colors. A third…
Author: Carl Mellor
The 2018 edition of Made in New York indeed stretches across our state. The annual show at Auburn’s Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center features artists from Webster and Rochester, Syracuse and Ithaca, Brooklyn and other locales. Their artworks depict scenes ranging from the Adirondacks to the New York City subway, deal with our relationship to nature, and focus on memory and remembering. Discussion of memory is both personal and broad-based. For example, Brad Cole’s “Swan Song,” an oil, portrays a young woman wading into water. The work evokes notions of passage and departure and is dedicated to his sister’s memory. Similarly, Jamie Young’s panoramic photo of a hillside recalls an area that held special meaning for his mother; it’s…
Keith Morris Washington’s pieces in “Within Our Gates: Site and Memory in the American Landscape” depict locations where lynchings took place.
The exhibit stresses two essential elements in Donaldson’s art: a strong belief in not separating art from community concerns, and an ability to create visually dynamic works.
Now at the Edgewood Gallery, Foolings Awakening is an extensive show with a roster of five artists and an array of works including assemblages, collages and mixed-media jewelry. Many of the pieces are small but compelling as they explore memories and the process of remembering. Dan Bacich has a bunch of his assemblages on display. These are small boxes containing found objects that communicate very well. In “American Express,” the remains of a chopped-up credit card mix with a gold figure. The “Soda Jerk” combines a toy figure twirling a lasso with signage for Coke and Sprite. Other pieces demonstrate the artist’s versatility. “Lot’s Wife” operates with minimal items: a tiny bowl and metal figure. “Pirate…
The Everson Museum of Art’s radically revamped Ceramics Gallery, now more than a year old, is still establishing its identity. The second exhibition staged in the space clearly accelerates that process. From Funk to Punk: Left Coast Ceramics, a show spanning 70 years of ceramics on the West Coast, fulfills multiple missions. First, it provides an overview of West Coast artists encompassing different eras and artistic styles, types of ceramics, and inspirations for the artists. To build a ground floor for the exhibit, curator Peter Held selected pieces from the Everson’s collection that were created between 1936 and 1986. The…
The huge group exhibit 2018 Public Arts Task Force (PATF) Snow Show starts with a roster of 55 artists and a portfolio of 175 artworks. It operates with a wide-open format and embraces various media, styles and influences. The exhibition sprawls up and down the hallways of the gallery at the Tech Garden, 235 Harrison St. Among other things, Snow Show displays works with a sense of place. Eva Hunter depicts Fat Bottom Pond in the Adirondacks, and Christian Day portrays Pleasant Valley Farm as well as a nearby road and forest. Sanlly Viera has created several pieces referencing either downtown…
For many years, Donalee Peden Wesley’s mixed-media drawings have focused on relationships between humans and animals. We All Fall Down, her one-woman show at the ArtRage Gallery, further documents her view of connections that are problematic, troubled, even outright exploitative. The exhibit encompasses topics such as puppy mills, factory farming, medical research, and the ongoing extinction of various species. The artist explores relations between animals and humans in a distinctive visual idiom, one that’s both topical and imaginative. For example, a drawing dealing with greyhound racing shows three dogs on top of each other pyramid-style. Similarly, a charcoal drawing referencing…
Edgewood Gallery’s new exhibit has a lot on its plate. A Visual Diary presents artists’ interpretations of scenes in upstate New York and Holland, encompasses media ranging from paintings to ceramics and jewelry, and touches on a teacher-student relationship. Years ago, Chris Baker taught art to David Owens. Now, the two of them are involved in a group show. Owens’ oil paintings depict both pastoral scenes, as seen in “Harvest Time,” and moments on a highway. In one work, he’s portraying trees, bushes and sky, done in purple and orange colors. In “September Light,” he’s working with cars, telephone wires…
In the course of her artistic career, Justyna Badach has photographed and critiqued landscapes, delved into male culture, and examined how Hollywood’s Westerns portrayed the American West. Her new body of work, Land of Epic Battles, is a series of handmade, dichromate prints that use film stills from ISIS training videos. The first solo exhibition of that work is on display at the Light Work gallery on the Syracuse University campus. Badach has appropriated and recast the videos, editing out overt, brutal imagery of beheadings, crucifixions and executions carried out by soldiers. She also experimented with darkroom techniques before choosing…
On the local art scene, 2017 was a time for large group shows linked to a theme, for solo exhibits covering everything from family history to blue-collar workers, for observance of various anniversaries. There were exhibitions featuring quilts, wood-block prints and work by such well-known artists as Henri Matisse and Edouard Manet. And the Everson Museum of Art christened its new ceramics space with two well-received exhibitions. Auburn’s Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center again hosted Made in New York, with a portfolio featuring pieces by artists living in our state. The 2017 show focused on the theme of “Envisioning the Future,”…
Oral histories come in various formats: in books, in conversations between elders and grandchildren, in radio or television programs, in other media. And now the ArtRage Gallery is hosting an exhibition devoted to 26 women who have lived in Central New York and are all at least 80 years old. Still The One: Douglas Lloyd Makes Portraits of Women Making Change the Old-Fashioned Way pairs Lloyd’s distinctive images with narratives developed during interviews conducted by Sharon Bottle Souva. Those conversations posed fundamental questions: What is activism? How do we make it through turbulent times? What values endure from decade to…
The holiday show and sale at the Edgewood Gallery features work by two veteran artists who keep shuffling the deck. Jan Navales creates pieces ranging from quilts to digital prints, from an artwork incorporating squash leaves to one utilizing shibori silk. Terry Askey-Cole, a ceramist, makes vases, bowls and mosaics, playing with texture and color. First, Navales clearly is comfortable with operating on the move. She shifts from a long quilt using actual leaves to “#16 Tree,” a piece made with fiber paste, silk, acrylic and other elements. A third work, “#20 Ginko,” was made from batik and cotton, while…
The notion of committee work typically receives mixed reviews. Decades ago, one wag remarked that a zebra is a horse designed by committee. However, the Syracuse Cultural Workers have long used a committee structure to launch their Women Artists Datebook, a pocket-sized (5-by-7-inch) publication now in its 25th edition. The 2018 datebook ($16.95) is currently being sold not only in Syracuse but across the country: via online transactions, at independent bookstores, food co-ops and small museums. Last December, selection of poems and artworks for the datebook began with a two-track process. Georgia Popoff, the committee’s poetry editor, reviewed submissions from…
On the one hand, there’s a world of overcrowded malls, news reports regarding which stores are open on Thanksgiving, and mass-produced goods. On the other, there’s a shopping circuit emphasizing hand-crafted items made by independent artists and artisans. Here’s a preview of that circuit in the Syracuse area. Art Mart, at age 63, shows no sign of slowing down. It’s a cooperative of 40 local artists who band together to create a marketplace for six weeks during the holiday season. They split the rent for a storefront at 499 S. Warren St. and work a total of 15 hours on…