Library Books

Years ago, the function of your local public library was pretty clear – it was all about the books, borrowing from the collection, using it for doing research, and homework. For many, it was a place to catch up on the national and international newspapers of the day. It also provided a few hours of sanctuary for the lonely, the widowed bereft, and the homeless. Today’s libraries still serve all of those needs, but they are multi-functional in ways that nobody could have imagined in the past. In addition to classes in literacy and computer tech., and providing WiFi to those without it at home, one only has to look at the calendars of libraries in the Hudson Valley from Phoenicia to Newburgh to witness the diversity of activities and programs on offer. These include classes in Tai Chi at the Kingston library, Yoga in Olive, film screenings in Saugerties, classical music concerts in Rosendale, a coding club in Newburgh, cartooning workshops in Woodstock, to name but a few. Some libraries have incorporated exhibition spaces to show the work of local and regional artists, thereby bringing visual art into the heart of the community and providing alternative spaces for artists and the public to traditional galleries and museums.

John A. Varriano — The Poet — Oil on canvas, 24” x 20”.

Among those libraries in the region that host art exhibitions are the Olive Free Library, the Saugerties Public Library, and the Woodbury Public Library and the Stone Ridge Library. Following is what they are offering this summer: The Olive Free Library, located at 4033 Rt 28-A, West Shokan, NY, is hosting a four person show entitled Go Figure that opens on May 18 with an artists’ reception for the public from 2 – 4 pm, and runs through July 6. Per its title, it is a show of figurative art featuring the work four well established Hudson Valley artists: Eddi Fleming, Keith Gunderson, Claire Lambe, and John A. Varriano, all of whom reside in different towns across the region.

Keith Gunderson -  Seated nude from the back — Charcoal and pastel on Canson Mi-Teintes paper, 25” x 15”

British-born Edie Flemming lives and works in Croton-on-Hudson; Gunderson is based in Kerhonkson; Lambe, who is Irish, is in Woodstock, and Varriano is in Gardiner, NY. All four artists have exhibited widely in the US and abroad; Lambe and Gunderson are both instructors at the Woodstock School of Art, and Varriano teaches in the Art Students League of New York. “Figurative art is one of humanity’s oldest forms of artistic expression, and has helped reveal the human condition for millennia,” says Go Figure curator Linda Lynton. “The figurative work of these four artists reveals the breadth of style and insight currently found in the region. Their work ranges from classical portraiture to contemporary styles, revealing current social and political concerns as well as the spiritual beauty of the human face and form.”

Eddi Fleming — Tiny Dancer -  Oil on board, 48” x 40”.

The exhibition, Go Figure, is followed at the Olive Free Library by Reverie, a juried group show of regional artists from Saturday, July 20 – September 7.

Saugerties Public Library, 91 Washington Avenue, opens its gallery space primarily to artists from the locality. It is currently showing the work of lawyer/artist/poet and Saugerties resident Elizabeth Shafer. As a lawyer, Shafer has dedicated much of her energies to the fight for a nuclear free world including serving on the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy. Her parallel life-long passion is for art making. Shafer has studied at the Art Students’ League, the Woodstock School of Art, R & F Encaustic Studios and taken print-making classes at Columbia University. More of her work can be seen this month at Emerge Gallery in Saugerties in a group collage exhibition, Cut Pieces, along with noteworthy artists Dorothea Marcus and Annie Loel Barr, among others.

Elizabeth Shafer — Spring Still Life, 2000 -  Oil on canvas. 30 x 22 inches

Shafer’s solo show at the Saugerties Public Library runs through June 29 and is followed by a show of work from British-born, Hudson Valley resident Prudence See in July and August. A gifted colorist, See is known for her luminous town and landscapes of Saugerties. Opening reception for this exhibition TBA.

The Woodbury Public Library at 16 County Rte 105, Highland Mills, NY 10930, is now showing work by Roger Dowd entitled Hurt of the Antarctic – a 3-D fantasy travelogue in which he combines model making, photography and paint with digital imaging to create images that often parody nineteenth century artistic styles. The show continues through May and is followed by a collection of botanical watercolor paintings by Barbara Dodsworth.

Barbara Dodsworth -  Lily. Watercolor.

Dodsworth is an Associate Professor of Music & Fine Arts in the Mercy College School of Liberal Arts. The exhibition is on view for the month of June and there is a “Meet the Artist” reception on Saturday, June 1st, 12 – 2 pm. Dodsworth’s fine botanicals take many hours to produce and often pose mathematical challenges found in nature. This exhibition will include a number of watercolors of flowers about which she said: “I want to create a certain unexpected feeling in the viewer, as he or she encounters a seemingly passive flower that appears to be endowed with sensitivity or reactivity.”

And currently at the Stone Ridge Library there is an on-going exhibit of watercolors by local artist Staats Fasoldt. The works are situated among the stacks in the 1798 library building as well as in the new Children’s Wing. Staats Fasoldt is Executive Vice President of the Woodstock School of Art’s Board of Directors, and has taught painting and drawing there for more than 35 years.

Staats Fasoldt — Watercolor

Hopefully more libraries will make room for exhibition space, whether it’s used for local school children’s art and amateurs, or professional artists, or all of the above. In Woodstock, where a new library building is now close to being assured, there is an opportunity to create something really inclusive for the community. Sad as many are to say goodbye to the quaint façade of the existing building, this will be an interesting project to watch. Today, as we endure so many attacks on our democracy, we need to cherish and support our public libraries, because a library is what democracy looks like.

Featured Image: Claire Lambe, Destination Unknown #3 (detail), 2017. Graphite – 80 x 40 inches.

All images courtesy of the artists or their representatives.

Laura Hexner’s meticulous drawings and paintings document some of America’s great feats of architecture, great bridges, overpasses and dams. Mary Anne Erickson is concerned with the disappearing world in which she grew up – the road-side diners and small family-run motels. Claire Lambe is documenting the future – she imagines the built environment being reclaimed by guerilla tactics of the natural environment, a kind of “Fall of the House of Usher.”

The exhibition starts on April 2 with an opening reception from 6―8pm at Cross Contemporary Art, 81 Partition St., Saugerties NY, and runs through April 24.  

Curator, Jen Williams Dragon, writes in the exhibition essay, “The ever-growing need for mankind to manage resources for living leads to the building of heroic structures…At odds with these systems are the destruction of rivers, vistas and natural habitats by concrete pillars, asphalt highways and ill-conceived housing projects. These structures are physically built to dominate and harness nature as well as facilitate the transit of natural resources. However, it is nature’s relentless superpower, entropy, that will ultimately dismantle and destroy all massive efforts to control and re-contour the environment.” She notes how these three artists, Lambe, Erickson and Hexner each consider the Pyrrhic victory of human constructions within the backdrop of an immense, relentlessly eroding and infinitely patient natural landscape.

Claire Lambe, Dan’s Dream (detail) 2016. Acrylic 40 x 20”

Irish-born Claire Lambe may be best known in the Hudson Valley area for her portraits, so the work here at CCA seems like a departure. “I love portraits,” says Lambe, “and have painted them on and off throughout my life, but I make a lot of other kinds of art too; I do love story and I love that this exhibition tells a story of the past, the present, and the future, through our particular lenses at least.” Lambe was among the artists in Hudson Valley 2012 at the Dorsky Museum and for that exhibition she produced a huge installation entitled Rock, Paper, Scissors and, although most of the work in this show will be painting, she will be installing a smaller piece from that suite. “The game of chance underlies everything and, I fear, between us and the planet, it’s looking like we’ve embarked on a game of winner-takes-all. I’m betting on the planet.” Much of her work in this show was done during a four month sojourn in Costa Rica. What captured her imagination there was the proliferation of construction projects – mostly condominiums — by foreigners (gringos) on choice pieces of coastline while, paradoxically, the coastline was littered with abandoned (ghost) building projects in the process of being reclaimed by the forest. “Thankfully, not enough to spoil it. Yet.”

Laura Hexner, Overpass, 2014. 11 x 22”

Hexner has been painting and drawing the often overlooked subjects of everyday life: bridges, dams, telephone poles and highways – monumental projects that become interventions in the landscape. Her technical elegance with seemingly mundane subjects creates an abstract drama characteristic of her work. Some of the images are rendered from high up – a bird’s eye view – while others are more of an ant’s eye view creating a sense of vertigo and adding emphasis to the grandeur and also to the loneliness of her subjects.

Mary Anne Erickson, Twin Arrows, Route 66, 2016. Oil 24 x 18”

Erickson has long been fascinated by the deterioration and decay of vintage roadside American culture. Her color saturated photo-realist paintings capture the faded bucolic optimism of the Post-War years against the backdrop of a vast and empty western landscape. “In 1950’s post-war America there was a sense of adventure when you set out on a ‘road trip.’ The whole country was a vacation playground with family-owned “mom and pop” motels, restaurants, and diners catering to travelers with their regional themes and local food specialties. Each business did their best to create a unique name, sign, or building that would attract attention and boost their notoriety,” says Erickson. “The beginning of the end came in 1956 with the opening of the Interstate Highway system and the proliferation of hotel/motel chains such as Holiday Inn. But some relics still remain, often abandoned, while many have been torn down to make room for a new strip mall or parking lot.” It is these icons that Erick seeks out to memorialize in her work. The four new pieces in this exhibition stem from a road trip on Route 66 Erickson took with CCA owner Jen Dragon with “Ride for the Relay,” a cancer research fundraiser.

Opening Reception Sat. April 2, 2016
 — 6-8pm —  on view thru April 24, 2016
Cross Contemporary Art 
81 Partition St. Saugerties, New York 12477

Featured Image: Claire Lambe, Midas (detail), 2016. Acrylic and gold leaf  — 20 x 40”

Images courtesy of the artists.

For more information about the exhibition and the gallery,
go to www.crosscontemporaryart.com, or call (845) 399‑9751

Artists’ websites:
 Claire Lambe,   Mary Anne Erickson

Jennifer by Keith Gunderson

As a curator, Esmark extends this “dance” with selected works by contemporary local artists who use the figure to explore and communicate what it means to be human. The diversity of the artists themselves, and their concerns, offer an exciting variation in what individuals feel is important about humanity; for some it is a fully realized representation of a figure while, for others, it is a more metaphysical rendering, for example, in Esmark’s own contribution to the exhibition.

All That (Passchendaele) by Barbara Esmark

Artists exhibiting in Being Human are:, Leslie Bender, Claire Lambe, Kazuma Oshita, Carol Zaloom, Jamie Midgley, Barbara Esmark, Lora Shelley, Bart Thrall, John Currie, Pat Kelley, Keith Gunderson, Janet Gunderson, Anne Stanner, Judith Zeichner John Varianno, Marsha Massih, John Wolfe, Stacie Flint, John Wolfe, Jr., Richard Corozine, Howard Miller, Elin Menzies, Julia Santos Solomon, Vindora Wixome, Lynne Friedman and Susan Miiller.

“Wedding” by Claire Lambe

“Head of the House” — wood, rice paper, stainless steel, light fixture — 2013 — by Kazuma Oshita

It must be something in the air as, suddenly, the galleries are full of figurative art, KMOCA on 103 Abeel St, also in the Rondout area of Kingston, has teamed pastel images by Paul Sigunick, that include portraits, with a contextualizing installation by Michael Asbill titled Look In, Look Out. In uptown Kingston the LGBTQ Center at 300 Wall St. is hosting Village Elders, an exhibition of photographic portraits by Penny Coleman of the senior citizens of the LGBT community who lived in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1990s (the works in this show are also the subject of a book of the same title which includes essay/interviews of the subjects). This year’s Hudson Valley Artists at SUNY New Paltz, which opens on June 20, is called “The Stories We Tell” and will no doubt include some figuration.

The Sigunick/Asbill exhibition at KMOCA opened on June 6 and runs through June 27. The gallery is only open on Saturdays from Noon — 4 PM.

Being Human at ASK opens to the public with a reception on Saturday, June 13, from 5–8pm. The exhibition is on view through June 27.

The LGBTQ Center, 300 Wall St. is hosting an Artist Reception on Saturday, June 13, 3–6pm. For more information, call: 845.331.5300

The Stories We Tell: Hudson Valley Artists 2015, is at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art’s Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery/North Gallery. Opening reception Saturday, June 20, 5–7 pm; the exhibition runs June 20—November 8, 2015

Kiki Smith, “Gone”– ink on paper, 30 by 20”

The ACC includes in its pedigree that, over 150 years ago, the Hudson River School, the country’s first indigenous art movement, was founded in its back yard.  In fact, I think Athens might be a bit of a secret so I almost hate to give it away, but right now the ACC is host to a particularly arresting art exhibition, Road Kill, curated by sculptor Tim Watkins. 

The title of the show was inspired by a poem by Chase Twichell in which the poet writes: “As a kid I always looked/at roadkill close up, and poked/a stick into it. I want to look at death/ with my eyes like my own baby eyes,/ not yet blinded by knowledge.

Watkins is one half of May & Watkins Design, the other half is his partner, painter Carol May, who is also one of the exhibitors. Together they create large-scale sculptures and installations for public spaces, museums, and interpretive centers. Their work is often whimsical and always interesting; the pieces tend to have a kinetic element and, especially when designed for children’s spaces, interactive. Watkins is also on the board of the Athens Cultural Center which is how he came to curate this show. Inspired by the success of last year’s art show at the Center curated by Carrie Feder with the theme of “Ice”,  he proposed another thematic show that would, once again, draw on artists local to the Hudson Valley as, he said, “There are a lot of very good artists living around here.” Included among those is the iconic feminist artist Kiki Smith, who has a home in the locality.

Tim Watkins, “Pod” – steel pipe, plate, nails. 6 x 4” x 7” deep, and
“Mouth” – steel pipe, nails, 4 x 9” x 4” deep

In his curator’s statement, Watkins stated that his goal was to invite a group of artists to explore the idea of Road Kill, not necessarily literally, but that possibility was not excluded. He said, “As artists, we are always exploring life and death. Our work is about ourselves, and at the same time we are also dwelling on issues like our own mortality and hoping that our best work will ‘travel’ beyond ourselves in time. I also believe that the artists’ role in society is that of a mirror, reflecting the life and times around us. Road Kill is about our roles, our thoughts and our fears.”

Bob Braine — “Fur coat” — ink jet on paper, 38x55”

A good deal of the work in the show does explore the consequences of our local faunas’ encounters with us humans, and acts as a salutation to those lives lost as a result and, in some cases, as cautionary tales. Bob Braine cheekily photographs an infant in a skunk costume in the middle of the road with the title: Fur Coat. This is juxtaposed by a companion photograph of a gravid snake destroyed on a similar road, perhaps even the same road, with its eggs and young broken from its body. Both of these photographs are separated by another depicting the corpse of a stork, that legendary bringer of babies, also spread-eagled on the asphalt. Braine raises doubts about the posterity of all of us, animal and human and, maybe, asks us to consider if the young of another species is less precious than our own, as his own; the infant is his own son. The mutilated snake is the one “ick” moment in the show and, yet, given the title, it would be remiss of the curator to protect us viewers from this uncompromising reality. This is road kill after all, and death, in all its bloody horror. By contrast, Portia Munson’s contribution of scanned images of dead birds laid out amid blossoms against her signature deep black backgrounds, are gentle and beautiful.

Claire Lambe, “Swoop” – mixed media including window, size variable.

Claire Lambe contributes an installation that is part of her Rock, Paper, Scissors suite. It consists of a large quantity of origami birds and, of course, scissors and rock. In this piece, Swoop, the rock is symbolized by the glass in the window at which the birds fly (the piece has a forced perspective so is also designed to be viewed through the window from the street). She was inspired in this design by the experience of a flock of starlings swooping in front of her car on the highway. Lambe references the games of chance that all creatures play who dare to leave the nest to venture into the world. The white-on-white feels ghostly; perhaps this is the last flight, or the flight of the dead. Lambe is a multidisciplinary artist who works in a variety of modes including painting.

Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond have also contributed bird images – Smith’s piece is an owl peering out of the darkness – scratched from an inky black background, and in Hammond’s case, there is an absence, an empty space, made clear by the evocative title: The Bird Has Flown. Smith and Hammond often collaborate and exhibit together but Watkins chose to separate them for this show. The dreamlike quality of Hammond’s piece in nicely echoed in Lambe’s nearby installation, Swoop. By contrast, Fawn Potash’s encaustic, Cape Cod Development, reminiscent of an aerial photograph, offers a macro view of man’s impact on nature in the form of the “development” of the title, oil spills and pollution on a grand and devastating scale.

Valerie Hammond, “The Bird has Flown,” Digital print with wax and drawing, 30 x 22”

Claudia McNulty’s poignant drawing of deer hung upside down on a hunter’s carrying stick is a reminder that many wild animals, especially deer, are prey to mankind’s appetites and sport. An all too often unfair contest as the hunter targets his quarry using telescopic sights from the comfort of his vehicle – a method of guerrilla warfare against the unsuspecting that has become the norm by well-heeled nations in the human theater of war. The drawing is overlaid by a Periodic Table from the chemistry lab perhaps to suggest that the deer are now reduced to only the sum of their parts. Or perhaps this relates to the Lyme disease of the title – an unfortunate consequence of our invasion of their territory that has resulted in the vilification of deer. This is a relatively subdued piece for McNulty who is known for her large-scale, edgy works that challenge our complacency with regard to our stewardship of the earth.

Claudia McNulty, “In and Out, Catching Lyme” – graphite and ink on paper, 48 x 72

Carrie Feder’s installation of miniature drawings in frames that commemorate the demise of various small animals is both touching and witty – the drawings, you discover on close inspection, are not sketches or illustrations of the casualties referenced, but abstract marks and grey shadows.  Each drawing includes an inscription on how an animal met its end. The title, Keriyah, refers to the Jewish custom of rending ones’ clothes in grief at the loss of a loved one and, in addition to the framed drawings, the installation includes a box of scraps of black material; visitors are encouraged to take a scrap and pin it to their clothes to mark their participation in the grieving process.

Carrie Feder, “Keriyah” (detail) – watercolor on paper, dimensions variable.

At this time of year, especially when in the countryside, we find ourselves swerving and careening, often risking our own lives, to avoid the kamikaze squirrels, chipmunks, and other small creatures that seem to hide in the undergrowth waiting for a car to appear with which to play a deadly game of chicken. This show reminds us that life is a game of chicken and death is the great leveler. Every night, as we shut our eyes, we take it on faith that we will wake up the following morning, but who is to know for whom the bell will toll that day.

Jan Harrison, “Dark Birdfish” – ceramic, approx. 11 x 5”

Other visual Artists participating in Road Kill include Matt Bua, Nancy Cohen, Ryder Cooley, Eric Egas, Randy Evans, Jan Harrison, Linda Horn, Cindy Karasek, Kim Mclean, Carol May, Christy Rupp and Linda Weintraub.  Performing Artists include Tina Chaden, Frank Cuthbert, Johnnie Moore, and Ryder Cooley, Hazel and the Dustbowl Faeries. The latter will perform in the closing reception on Saturday, August 9.  The show runs through August 10

All images are courtesy of the artists.

Featured Image: Portia Munson, Downy Woodpecker:
pigmented ink on rag paper, 22 x 20″ — courtesy of the artist and PPOW Gallery

The Gallery is open on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 – 4 pm
For more information: call 518–945-2136
Or email: info@athensculturalcenter.org

For information on the Athens Cultural Center:
www.athensculturalcenter.org

For information on May & Watkins Design LLC:
www.maywatkinsdesign.com

SUNY New Paltz has been enjoying a rise in national rankings and this is surely a reflection of the breadth of its faculty. The Art Department faculty includes artists who have come to the university from countries as far apart as Israel, Anat Shiftan; Uruguay, Rimer Cardillo; and Germany, Andrea Frank. The American faculty is drawn from every part of the United States, most have exhibited internationally and many have spent substantial periods of time abroad.

Scratch Berg, 2011; Itty Neuhaus

Itty S. Neuhaus who was recently the recipient of a Fulbright award that enabled her to spend time in Newfoundland and Labrador over two summers, imagining what is beneath the surface of ice-bergs that is invisible to the eye. One of those imaginings, Scratch Berg, is included in the exhibition. Visualizing that which is hidden is an ongoing theme with Neuhaus’s work – her installations with layers of fabric and glassine paper have a womb-like quality. Scratch Berg has been given a fantastical, huge, yet delicate, calligraphic underside. Amy Papaelias, Neuhaus’s colleague in the same section of the department, is a Graphic Designer who explores the relationship between visual and verbal communication through, as she calls it, “expressive typography.” Her piece Persona Type: Living Type combines web fonts with user-generated web content to demonstrate the emotive qualities of type – the web content is appropriated from posts, tweets and comments. Aleánna Luethi-Garrecht, from Switzerland, is also a Graphic Designer and also works with typography but on fabric panels. She is interested in discovering letterform and typography as textural and rhythmic elements.

Lineform and Letterform: Typography in Textural Experiences, June 2012; Aleánna Luethi-Garrecht

Anyone who saw photographer François Deschamps’s recent exhibition at the Dorsky of work done during his sojourn in the African country of Mali will enjoy his photograph, Colonial Hat, made in 2007 — not only for its foreshadowing of his Photo Rapide instant photographic studio, after those of the Malian photographers he met in Mali’s capital city of Bamako, but also for its wit. In Colonial Hat, all that’s left of colonialism is the hard hat of the great white hunter, suspended by a string to hang over the space where the colonist’s head used to be. In every way this is a classic western studio shot from the ornate pedestal, on which the subject might rest a hand, to the photographic backdrop. It even seems to include the shadow of the missing—defunct—colonist. Ann Lovett, also a Professor of Photography, has traveled from Oregon to Iceland to Ireland developing a series of water studies “exploring light, space, and surface.” She is interested in how nature sculpts and alters the landscape; how changing weather reveals new patterns. Her monochromatic photographs of water and beach also illustrate the sensuousness of that work.

François Deschamps Colonial Hat, from the series Absence of Presence, 2007; François Deschamps

Untitled (Kerlingarfjöll, Iceland), 201; Ann Lovett

The Sculpture Department is represented by, among others, Associate Professor Steven P. Bradford with two pieces, Survival and Dead Man Shoes. Survival, which is a text from a 1968 Army Field Manual entitled “Survival, Evasion and Escape,” and the titular shoes in the second installation were both left behind in buildings Bradford took over, in the first instance by the deceased owner of a building the artist acquired for a studio. With Dead Man Shoes, the artist has created a machine, partly constructed out of what appears to be a hat-stand, whereby the shoes continue to walk, possibly forever. It is a delightfully horrific piece of art.

Dead Man Shoes, 2007; Steven P. Bradford

Sculptor Emily Puthoff’s work comprises sculpture, installations, digital media, prints/drawings, performance/interventions, and artist books. Her piece in this exhibition is composed of improvisations by Julia Alsaraff, at Puthoff’s suggestion, played through ceramic speakers created by Puthoff.

We are floating in a medium of vast extent (excerpt from Pascal’s Pensées), 2007–20130; Emily Puthoff

Other works that caught my eye were the fabulous mandala-like pieces of Professor of Painting, Amy Cheng, and the woven (card-board packaging) creations, entitled Noise, of Assistant Professor in Art Education, Jessica Poser. Poser’s aim is to explore the visual detritus or noise in domestic life—that’s “noise” as in the process of video disambiguation, or “snow.” Cheng’s aim is to explore work that is about visual play and pleasure and employs the textures of lace, brocade, silks and satins: “I try to evoke what Zen practitioners call nothing and everything.”

Topkapi, 2011; Amy Cheng

Broaching the Subject, 2012; Amy Cheng

Susan Stokes piece Ascension is unapologetically figurative, one of the few artists working with the figure in the exhibition. Ascension is a beautifully realized contemplation of the relationships of family, generational cycles, loss, mortality, and also freedom. Stokes lives and works in Bloomington, New York. She also works in performance and installation and is the founder and artistic director of the theatrical performance group Cave Dogs. In the latter she fills a multitude of roles including writer, lighting, set and costume designer.

As stated above, there are twenty-eight faculty members showing work in this exhibition and I have just skimmed the surface here so, readers, I recommend that you take an afternoon off and check it out for yourselves, if you can. One wonderful thing about the timing of this exhibition is that it coincides with the presentation of work by art majors receiving their BFA and MFA degrees at the university. Therefore, “Fields of Vision” allows visitors to consider how the work of the students might relate to that of faculty.

“Fields of Vision” runs through June 23, 2013.

MUSEUM HOURS:

Wednesday – Sunday: 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Closed Mondays, Tuesdays, and Holidays)
Please call ahead during summer and intersessions to confirm exhibitions available.

LOCATION:

State University of New York at New Paltz
1 Hawk Drive, New Paltz, NY 12561
845.257.3844

Featured image; Ascension, 2012; Suzanne Stokes

The different stories present the voices of an assortment of characters: a grocery store owner, a gastroenterologist, an actress, a painter, a cultural studies fellow, a transport employee, a commercial real estate developer, an idler, a university lecturer, a Mexican jack-of-all-trades. Beneath the diversity it is the human spirit itself that is Keller’s subject. Each of his tales journeys deep as well as wide, and displays a delight in the absurdities of human nature that made this reader laugh out loud.

The opening story, “People Like Me Better Because I Like Guacamole,” previously published by Glimmer Train, is the tale of Dmitri Sachenkov, a Russian PhD who is hired to go to Southern Chile to write advertising copy. At a layover in Moscow he meets a gypsy who predicts his death — “I have never opened myself up more to the possibility of death than on a trip where it has been predicted by a gypsy that I will die,” Dmitri says -  and he decides to go anyway. Keller, who has spent the past decade teaching alternately in New York and Latin America, and traveling to Europe and the Far East, has also written three novels, the first of which will be published next summer.

Reading Keller’s work, one wonders if he hasn’t stumbled upon the most poetic and the most profound writer of his generation, comparable only to the South American masters, Bolano, Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Dr. Cicero Books, his publishers, are as international as Keller is, and are based in Rio de Janeiro, New York and Paris. They are at the forefront of the new breed of small, ambitious imprints that have sprung up to replace the publishers of previous generations. A Bald Man With No Hair is now available online through booksellers such as Amazon, and at select bookstores.

Roll Magazine: John Keller, you were raised in El Paso, a two-headed city, so to speak, attached to Juárez, Mexico, like Siamese twins. Has this dual identity of your early years influenced your life and work?

JK: It has. And probably most clearly by providing me with an extra set of synonyms for every word I knew in English. Mexico was always sitting just outside El Paso like a dream. And, in fact, it is the much larger of the two cities: 1.4 million to El Paso’s 650,000, and the two downtowns are connected. And, not only did this provide me with another word to describe everything, there was also a new sentiment, a new way of looking at every old thing. Crossing this border—physically, metaphorically—you were suddenly, immediately halfway across the world.  I think in a sense we all have a bicultural—or multicultural—birthright; mine just happened to have a very obvious physical aspect to it. And growing up in El Paso also gave me one of the greatest gifts of all: the ability to grow up as an outsider in my own country, and to always see things—everything—inside out.

Roll: Is writing something you’ve come to relatively recently, or has the need to write always been with you?

JK: My parents tell me I began writing when I was four. I was obsessed with stapling together sheets of loose-leaf paper in the form of a book. There were always dozens of these things lying around the house. I started a magazine when I was in elementary school—probably again because I was just as much in love with the physical object as I was with what you found inside it—and another one, something called the Irish Liberation Manifesto, in high school, that we even got the school to pay for.

Roll: Irish Liberation Manifesto?

JK: I went to a Catholic high school in downtown El Paso. Eighty-five percent of the students in the school were Mexican or of Mexican descent. But our mascot was the Fighting Irish. We wanted to re-name ourselves the Fighting Mexicans; for some reason, the school wouldn’t have it.

Roll: Which writers would you cite as influences on your work?

JK: I think that my writing has probably been less influenced by other writers than by certain types of music or other arts, or even other languages, including the sounds of certain voices, those of friends or people like, for example, George Carlin, who was probably one of the greatest orators of our times. But the writers I hold closest to my heart are…to name the first to come to mind: Borges, Wilde, Machado de Assis, Dickens, Jorge Amado, García Márquez, Murakami, Nabokov, Sontag and Steinbeck.

Roll: You’re also a novelist. Tell us about your longer fictions.

JK: I’ve written three novels, one of which, Know Your Baker, is slated for publication in July ’13, the other two in subsequent years. KYB is about an artist—a famous one—who disappears, mysteriously leaving behind a painting the art community interprets as a suicide note. It’s also about the true-life story of the Juárez murders, the hundreds of girls who’ve gone missing or been murdered over the past two decades on the border. My second novel, which is called The Box and the Briefcase, the Moleque and the Old Man and the First Coming of the Second Son of God is about a gated city in Brazil where, to be granted citizenship, you have to either look perfect already or undergo plastic surgery to meet local beauty standards. The main character is a young girl, a soap opera actress, who was born and raised there but wants to leave the community and see what the rest of Brazil is like—which is forbidden by her parents and the community at-large. The last one, Abracadabrantesque, I’m still not entirely sure how to describe. It follows its protagonist all over the world—from England to Italy to Uruguay to the Sahara and finally to New York—over the course of 30 years, during which time the American Century unravels.

Roll: Thank you, John. Good luck with all these projects, and we hope to see you in Roll Magazine again soon.

Featured image of the author by Allesandro Clemenza

Second only to Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s one-act play, Endgame, is the most frequently performed of his works. Hudson Valley theatergoers — and Beckett enthusiasts and theatergoers from wider afield — will have a new opportunity to see this modern classic in a humorous, faithful version by The Woodstock Players. Their production features Carey Harrison and Mik Horowitz as Hamm and his servant, Clov, and David Smilow and Sara Chodoff as Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell. The director, Andrea Cunliffe, is a longtime student and servant of Beckett’s plays, and brings to Endgame a lifetime of theatrical experience, much of it focused on Beckett’s works. Audiences can expect both the devoted attention to the text and its copious directions that the author himself notoriously demanded, and the kind of spirited wit and delivery that local theatergoers have come to expect from Mik Horowitz, and more recently from Carey Harrison, seen in his own play, Magus, and in David Mamet’s American Buffalo, both Woodstock Players productions. Their Endgame will be opening Friday September 7 at The Byrdcliffe Theater, playing that weekend and the following weekend at 8 on Friday and Saturday and at 5 on Sunday, before moving to Saugerties’ new SPAF performing space for one night only, on Friday September 21st. at 8 PM.

Samuel Beckett, photo by John Minihan, 1985

Endgame was written ten years after Waiting For Godot, a play which took five years to reach the stage and, when it did, startled audiences with its mixture of black humor and cosmic despair. Like Godot, Endgame was written in French, a language Beckett found even more expressive than his native English, and one that he had studied at Trinity College in his native city of Dublin and in which he acquired fluency from decades of residence in Paris. Before its debut in Paris, Waiting For Godot was first performed in London — in French! It’s hard to imagine a play premiering in the UK in French now. Indeed, when Beckett translated the play himself and it reached the English-speaking stage in English, it might just as well have been in French for all the baffled audiences made of it. It wasn’t until a performance of Waiting For Godot at San Quentin prison that the play found an audience of inmates who understood the play perfectly: a tale of human beings trapped in a repetitive cycle of day after identical day, waiting for a release that never comes. By the time Beckett wrote Endgame, also in French and then in the author’s own translation, Waiting For Godot was finding a wider following.

Endgame takes place in a different landscape from the bleak terrain of Godot. Now Beckett’s characters have withdrawn into a refuge, in order to survive. The world around Beckett had changed since 1947, and the despair that many felt when contemplating the human condition after the most educated nation on earth has conceived of the death camps, and brought them into reality, gave way to the threat of nuclear war: a threat not just of terminal boredom and frustration, as in Godot, but of extinction. The busy construction of nuclear shelters appears to have inspired Samuel Beckett to speculate about the fate of those who survived in such a shelter, as their supplies ran out, and the world outside the shelter offered no hope of renewed life.

The cast of characters in Endgame revisits two of the figures in Waiting For Godot, the landowner Pozzo and his slave Lucky. In Endgame these representative types are the chief characters, Hamm and Clov: they are the master and servant who have retreated into a shelter but find themselves cornered there. Hence the title: it’s the endgame, as in the conclusion of a game of chess. There are few moves left.

Like Pozzo and Lucky in Godot, Hamm and Clov are reminiscent of Irish history: the Anglo-Irish master and his Irish servant. They evoke, too, every master and servant, locked into co-dependency, struggling to escape. Will Clov make good his longing to leave the refuge, even at the cost of his life? On this tension the play suspends cadenzas of Beckettian wit and acknowledgement of our common fate: ‘The end is in the beginning and yet we go on,’ says Hamm. It’s Beckett’s central motif. Doomed to live, fated to die, unable to cease — what’s left for us but to laugh at our own enslavement? Happily for Beckett’s audiences, our majestic author finds humor in us and for us at every turn, as he holds up a mirror to our deepest selves — to the human condition itself.

Director Andrea Cunliffe and Stage Manager Athena Baer

The Byrdcliffe Theater is two miles uphill from the village of Woodstock in the historic Byrdcliffe Artists’ Colony. For directions to the Byrdcliffe Theater, search maps for 380 Upper Byrdcliffe Rd, Woodstock, NY 12498

Show runs from September 7 – 16, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 PM Sundays at 5 PM at The Byrdcliffe Theater. And on September 21 at 8 PM at Saugerties Performing Arts Factory (SPAF), 169 Ulster Ave (Rte. 212) in Saugerties. Sunday performances end with a Q & A with the director and actors.

The tickets for Endgame are $15, one price for all – cash or checks only at the door please. This production is not suitable for children under 14.

For reservations, call 845.901.2893 or contact the Woodstock Players via their website:

www.TheWoodstockPlayers.com

rehearsal photos courtesy, The Woodstock Players