The show, which is entitled “Inside/Out,” is the first of several in 2015 to be curated by Pamela Blum, an artist, art professor and arts administrator. Blum says her focus will be in sharing “imaginative, proficient uses of R&F’s pigment sticks and encaustic and showing how artists synthesize materials, form and subject matter to show meaning.” For “Inside/Out,” Blum chose a sampling of Pressman’s work from the last two years. She noted that the marks, edges, lines and shapes in the paintings also refer to “the relationships of private and public places — forces in our lives that start in private but affect a larger public.” Blum added, “Lisa’s images teeter totter on the edges of total abstraction and things we recognize. This indeterminate places gives you, the viewer, room to interpret her work for yourself.”
Pressman, who resides in New Jersey but has a weekend house in Andes, has exhibited throughout the United States. Her work was included in The Huffington Post’s “Ten Memorable Paintings from 2014.”
Stepping into the storefront room of KMOCA, the mood is appropriately Nordic, an extension of the Kingston snowscape (which only now is beginning to melt, the ubiquitous crust of crystallized white shrinking into big cartoon shapes). A sense of stark nature is conveyed by Ellen Driscoll’s two floor-to-ceiling installations along the back wall. One, entitled Naiad, is a 10-foot-high panel of thick black cotton printed with a photographic image of pale, ghostly thickets of bare branches. It hangs from a branchlike rod, but a foot over the floor, droops two “legs,” as if it where a piece of furniture, not a curtain, that trail across the floor and puddle into a heap of printed fabric. “Naiad” refers to the female spirits of Greek mythology who presided over fountains, springs, and other sources of fresh water; as the personage of the spirit, the piece sounds an elegiac note. The puddle of fabric could be interpreted as a reference both to the finiteness of water as well as its domination by man, the harnessing of its wildness. The thicket might suggest complexity, the tangling of issues that usurps positive action.
At the opposite corner of the wall, rags of industrial felt, printed with a mottled pattern of grays that suggest the dark reflections in water, hang off one side of a spindly, white ladder, created from paper pulp, which is propped against the wall and only has two steps; some of the rags are piled on the floor, and on the adjoining wall, a long piece of white felt, stippled with curvy and geometrically patterned cutout shapes, like the marking of a map or code for a computer program, hangs from a hook, as if it were a used bath towel. The piece is entitled Stilt, and its allusion to the poles enabling a person to rise above the ground suggests an ominous aftermath: the stilt is presumably the ladder, whose missing steps prevent the protagonist from climbing very high, limiting her to a myopic viewpoint; it’s been set aside and strewn with the wreckage of the water-like-patterned felt. The white felt, whose allusions to a map associate it with the view of the earth experienced by the stilt walker, has also been discarded. One could read the piece as an environmental allegory related to lack of action or perspective on climate change or water pollution — the folly of the human protagonist in caring for Earth and short-sightedness is dealing with serious problems.
The adjoining walls are hung with Kathy Goodell’s mysterious, mostly black photographs, in which an eerie blue glow is accompanied by a lozenge of what appear to be trees reflected in water in one piece and a barely decipherable gridded window, its panes inscribed with strange patterns, in another. The images operate on the edge of vision and as such, are similar to James Turrell’s sculptural light pieces in that they are about perception itself, since there is no apparent object (nor identifiable medium; the means by which Goodell captured the images, while on a residency in France, is unfathomable). The photographs are entitled Vestiges of Bandaloop, a reference to the enigmatic spirits in Tom Robbins’ novel, Jitterbug Perfume, further hinting at their unknowability, yet magnetic sensory force.
In the back room, the two artists are represented by very different bodies of work — Goodell by three drawings in ink, acrylic and enamel, entitled Phantasmagorique. Their lacy, delicate patterns suggest in two instances classic Chinese landscape paintings, though their oval format disputes the landscape association. Driscoll has contributed a series of small gestural ink drawings on gold leaf on paper that suggest nautical themes; several include an overlay of organza, which creates an almost cinematic montage-like effect, heightening the sense of passing motion, the momentary glimpses one experiences on a wave-rocked boat.
Both artists have been awarded Guggenheim awards, among other honors. Driscoll, who is co-chair of studio arts at Bard College, has done ambitious public art projects, including last year’s Distant Mirrors, a floating archipelago referring to the oil industry in the Providence River, and FASTFORWARDFOSSIL, a multi-year project focusing on the relationship between water and oil. Goodell, a native of California who is an art professor at SUNY New Paltz, has shown her photographs, drawings and sculpture in dozens of exhibitions across the U.S., Europe, Mexico, and South America.
At the Storefront Gallery, Woodstock-based artist Roberta Sickler is showing her landscapes of Skye, the Outer Hebrides, the Aran Islands and other remote places in Scotland and Ireland, which were done over a succession of trips from the mid 1990s to 2005. Sickler’s painterly technique is very effective in depicting ancient stone cottages subsumed into the landscape by time and the elements in a setting of moody gray skies, stormy seas, and wind-blown moorlands. Over in Midtown, the ARTBAR Gallery is exhibiting a selection of works by SUNY BFA and MFA candidates, which consist of a lively mix of sculpture, installations, prints, photographs, drawings, and paintings.
