Acknowledgments
Each of the ten artists selected for In Western New York 2000 deserves thanks for their willingness to participate in the project. We also want to thank those individuals who were not included in the final selection but who, at the eleventh hour, provided us with additional material and accommodated our last-minute requests. The good news about In Western New York is its ongoing status. An exhibition with a distinguished history, there is always another opportunity to submit.
At the Albright-Knox, curatorial assistant Holly Hughes, working closely with curatorial interns Alexandra Kogler and Thomas Smrtic, organized all material for our initial review and helped with every phase of the project. Editor Betsy McCall finessed the publication into shape, all the while maintaining an infectious sense of humor.
Finally, we want to acknowledge Sarah Kellner, formerly the director of visual arts at Hallwalls, now executive director of DiverseWorks ArtSpace in Houston, Texas, for bringing additional artists to our attention. For two curators new to Western New York, her recommendations were indispensable.
– D.D. and C.S.
For two curators fresh on the scene, the opportunity to organize In Western New York 2000 was an eye-opening experience. This year's project involved processing more than 120 submissions and traveling at least five times that many miles to the studios of prospective invitees. It's a proposition that tested our curatorial mettle, as we attempted to bring some kind of order to an inherently chaotic ensemble, the equivalent of an artistic Tower of Babel, where supposedly like-minded individuals end up expressing themselves in wildly diverse ways.
Douglas Dreishpoon
Accepting the challenge meant embracing all constraints and moving ahead. We spent a lot of time up front reviewing every submission that entered our office. This time around, we opted to narrow our final selection to ten individuals, which enabled us to include more works by each artist. Rather than limit a larger number of artists to only a few examples each, we elected to give a smaller group greater representation. The material selected spans a spectrum of art practices, from traditional drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography to more ambitious multimedia installations. Our intention was to create an exhibition whose varied contents reflect the present state of art's expressive potential In Western New York.
We were both pleased and excited as we made our studio rounds. Right in our backyard, here in Buffalo, we discovered Terry Beebe, who has been quietly producing exquisite abstract drawings in graphite, charcoal, colored pencil, and ink. With their uncanny affinity to Aboriginal dream paintings, Beebe's surreal travelscapes suggest metaphorical journeys through time. Their intimate scale complements Robert Hirsch's photographic microcosms multiple images (some appropriated, others shot on the spot) that seem to emerge from a vast black void. In this ongoing series, Hirsch responds to nineteenth-century representations of the landscape as a sublime and heroic entity, subverting this perception through quotidian, postcard-like images printed in miniature format on a meticulously burned-in background.
The diminutive scale of Beebe and Hirsch's work stands out against more monumental installations by Sharon McConnell and Kurt Von Voetsch. A native of Niagara Falls, Von Voetsch's idiosyncratic sculptural machines (many custom-designed for his own body) probe issues of identity and masculinity with a healthy dose of humor. McConnell's embroidered membrane sheets suspended from the ceiling, a fabric piece titled Heirloom, and a series of fan-like objects, pay homage to devastating natural forces personified as females. Reminiscent of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, 1979, in its roll-call recognition of famous women, as well as Contingent, 1968-69, one of Eva Hesse's most monumental and compelling works, McConnell's sculptures humanize powerful phenomena through the most insubstantial of materials.
McConnell's studio is located in Belmont, about six miles west of Alfred University. The day we visited her, we were also introduced to several members of the art faculty, including the printmaker Xiaowen Chen, whose work combines photography, drawing, and expressive brushwork with traditional intaglio and planographic techniques. Chen's images are subtle; while some are layered and complex, others are minimal and austere. Like the poetic form of haiku, their understated content is full of innuendo.
During our rounds, we found three accomplished painters: James Allen, Katherine Hannigan, and David Schirm. Still one of Buffalo's best-kept secrets after more than twenty years, Allen continues to paint and draw in the quiet environs of his attic studio. His deftly conceived drawings, with their distinct tongue-in-cheek humor, immediately captured our attention, and after seeing his entire "Woods" series, we decided to present this aspect of his production along with one of his more recent silhouette paintings titled Man Measuring Himself Against Elephant. Both the drawings and the painting issue from a sensibility that recognizes the absurdness of life.
Hannigan's notion of painting is rooted in autobiography. Her compositions amalgams of found objects, canvas, and paint project human figures, depicted as swimmers in various contracted and extended poses, against a layered, painted background of maps and language. In this metaphorical arena, figures hovering above geographical landmarks remain free agents in an ever-changing world. In a recent series of digital prints, the artist continues to explore her own history and peripatetic wanderings.
David Schirm's studio in Batavia was the last stop in our day-long tour of Belmont and Alfred. Close to exhaustion when we arrived, by the time we left an hour-and-a-half later, we had been revived by a series of animated paintings that seemed to jump off the wall. Wild in their high-keyed colors, Schirm's canvases, in their combination of personal narrative, tight brushwork, and abstract design, can be seen as episodes in an evolving life, a distillation of past experiences and immediate encounters realized empirically through the act of painting.
Closer to home, in East Aurora, Joshua Marks constructs sculptural objects with a strong conceptual bent. Carefully handcrafted and designed, his miniature tableaux tackle sociopolitical issues corporate hierarchies, social conformity, rampant materialism with poignant humor. These seemingly hermetic and timeless worlds look back to utopian aspirations of postwar America at the same time they forecast an unsettling future. Joining the real world, in this case, seems like a bleak ordeal.
We were thrilled when Tony Conrad proposed an audio installation for Gallery 12 in our 1905 building. Best known for his work in film and video, Conrad has earned a distinguished place in the history of vanguard music and performance art, as both developed in New York during the early sixties. More recently, his projects have developed around more esoteric ruminations in this case, Galileo's prescient theories of accelerated motion, which inspired the design and construction of a hybrid object part sculpture, part machine, part musical instrument. In its dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, the result is an appropriate coda to an exhibition that views the state of creativity In Western New York through the widest of wide-angle lenses.
Curator
Claire Schneider
Assistant Curator