Three of the four artists in this year’s 2023 Mohawk-Hudson Regional Invitational at Albany Center Gallery observe and dissect the world on the way to making their art, which shines without commentary, in two dimensions. The fourth artist turns to imaginary nonsense and serves as a cheerful counterpoint in three dimensions.
In this way, the show does what every year it manages so well: It expands on the work of a handful of artists plucked from last year’s Mohawk-Hudson Regional, which is necessarily diffuse and filled with discontinuity. Here, cohesion is evident, even with the one outlier, partly because of a crisp, controlled finish everywhere.
The most obviously deconstructive pieces are the mixed-media collages of Genève Brossard. Using a photographic print as a base, the artist amended the surfaces with incongruous elements that structurally work against the perspective of their inherent pictorial spaces. “Maybe Just Some Tape #3” uses a pair of brightly saturated images of a desert as the basis, with a geometric object rising up in one like a crude plywood statue. Added layers of clear and blue tape complicate the view, demanding that we see the collage as a made object.
Brossard has a number of these kinds of layered works, each quite different from the next. “Maybe Just Some Tape #5” reaches an involved and intriguing level, guiding our eye down a curving staircase with added tape and plastic obstructing our view, making you want to look all the more.
2023 Mohawk-Hudson Regional Invitational
When: through June 2
Where: Albany Center Gallery, 488 Broadway, Albany
Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday
Admission: Free
Info: https://www.albanycentergallery.org/ or 518-462-4775
The works by Rita MacDonald are more inwardly refined. Her pencil drawings of floorboards are literal, flat copies of…
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