The
Uncanny Valley
By Alison Woods
...and reassembles them into something quite
different: large, colorful, indeterminate landscapes featuring funny
bubble or lozenge forms.
Richard Deon’s perplexing paintings have a at affect and
a recurring gure that seems to consist of two legs and an extended
hand for a head. If it’s possible to be quietly zany, Daniel
Bejar’s silent video of a jet en route from Boston to New
York, rerouted digitally by the artist and shown side-by-side with
a printout of the plane’s ight plan, does it. Susan Magnus’s
large installation of Mylar strips hanging from ceiling height shimmers,
trembles and re ects the work in the show as well as the viewers,
adding to the funhouse effect.
Roads, vehicles and trains run through "The Uncanny Valley,"
another longstanding part of life in this region, where carriage
trails for enjoying scenic views have existed since the 18th century.
Today’s Hudson Valley vista is as likely to feature a four-lane
or a parking lot as a grove of trees, though. Margaret Crenson shows
very small and handsomely rendered oil paintings of the Taconic
Parkway during snow season. Harry Wilks’ black-and-white photographs
of bridges, docks and roadsides all seem to be taken from the peculiar
point of view of guardrails and handrails, creating a deep perspective
in each image that ends at points as majestic as Bear Mountain or
the Hudson River, or as mundane as the Plattekill post ofce. The
gorgeous and mysterious "Roadside Landscapes" by Jared
Handelsman are large photograms of leaves and plant parts, exposed
at night by car headlights along the roadside of his Catskill home....
CONTINUE.... |
