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PRESS ROOM

Emerging From the Edge
March 19, 2005

A Peekskill exhibit scours the top MFA programs to discover tomorrow’s artists today
By Georgette Gouveia

Entrails made out of dust. A Chinese lantern fashioned out of bright-yellow cocktail napkins. A sculpture concocted from cake-decorating materials.

The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill has peered into art’s funky future and likes what it sees.

Through September, the center is presenting “First Look”, which brings together 15 painters, sculptors and media artists enrolled in master of fine art programs at top schools throughout the Northeast, including Purchase, Bard, Brooklyn and Hunter Colleges; Columbia, New York and Yale Universities; and the Rhode Island School of Design.

The artists were culled from a survey of more than 500 student studios in 15 schools as far flung as Los Angeles. The resulting exhibit, says executive director Sara J. Pasti, is both “a reflection of current work and a hint of what is to come.”

And while the show embraces a variety of media, “painting is very strong”, says Livia Straus, a Chappaqua resident who founded the center last June with her husband, Marc, as a way to promote new work as well as share much of their collection. Indeed, Marc Straus, an oncologist who is also a published poet, points with certain gleeful satisfaction to three striking canvases that form a seamless transition from abstract to representational art. (This after a dealer informed him in the 1980’s that painting was dead.)

It’s alive and well in Skyler Brickley’s “Untitled”, a surrealistic study of an androgynous nude with a red umbrella that casts an eerie red shadow on a barren stretch of sand. The Yale student’s oil and acrylic painting is flanked by Francesca DiMattio’s “Undertow”, a somewhat abstract study of a lifeguard stand with a yellow umbrella; and Allison Gildersleeve’s “Untitled”, a mixed-media abstraction that Marc Straus says has the fierce strength of a Helen Frankenthaler.

The painterly trio hovers like starkly covered angels over Cal Lane’s “Dirt Lace”, a filigree design made out of earth on a gallery floor that evokes everything from mandalas to café curtains. It reminds us that while traditional media like painting and sculpture will never fade, contemporary artists will also continue to use natural materials and found objects to mimic still other media.

Lane, an MFA candidate at Purchase College, is one of five “First Look” artists who talked with the Journal News about their work either by phone or at an exhibit reception. All took unusual and varied paths to art –from construction work to physics. And none has any illusions about being the next hot thing. Though they all hope to continue doing what they love.

The horror, the horrah

When Tamy Ben-Tor made “Hitler: The Horror and the Horrah”, a trio of videos, for a 2003 Berlin exhibit that explored Israeli artists’ perceptions of the Nazis, she was “trying to rock the boat.” Apparently, she’s succeeded. On the day of this interview, her work has just been rejected by one worried New York exhibitor. And perhaps that’s not surprising, as “The Horror and the Horrah” mixes Yiddish, ‘30s musical-comedy numbers, Hitler mustaches and self-serving talking heads in a production that is part mock-documentary and part mock-music video. Like Broadway’s “The Producers”, and TV’s “Hogan’s Heroes”, “The Horror and the Horrah” – the title alludes to the circular Jewish dance – seeks to disarm the monstrosity of Nazism through humor.

“It’s not about the Holocaust but about the way we remember it,” says Ben-Tor, 29. And the way we remember it still gives power to Nazism, says the artist, who describes Hitler as a “stupid little racist”.

Still, Ben-Tor, who comes from Jerusalem, understands that for many, the man who killed millions will never be funny or little. And she shares the disdain that many art lovers feel for the Jewish Museum’s misguided “Mirroring Evil” exhibit (2002), which trivialized Nazism by equating it with Prada and other products.

“It’s so complex”, she says, putting her hands to his face.

Far less controversial is the way “Women Talk About Adolf Hitler”, a section of “The Horror and the Horrah”, satirizes the press’ penchant for interviewing people who are not experts on a subject but don’t mind blathering on before the media.

For Ben-Tor, who will graduate from Columbia next year and dislikes the term “performance artist”, her work is “more about taking on different characters with different ideologies – the more ideologies the better.”

Painting Paparazzi

In Miki Carmi’s world, the paintbrush is mightier than the airbrush. And that is why Playboy is unlikely to ever come calling for his photographic services – though he adds with a half-playful, half-wistful sigh, “I wish”.

It’s just as well, since the artist’s specialty is capturing his relatives right down to the last red-rimmed wrinkle. Carmi, 28, who also comes from Jerusalem and will graduate from Columbia this year, is something of a kamikaze paparazzi, zooming in on his unsuspecting family members with a microscopic lens – “like this”, he says, suddenly framing the reporter’s face with his forefingers and thumbs. (Perhaps he might consider a career behind the camera for Fox’s “Stars Without Makeup” specials.)

Also unlikely: Carmi’s photographs are merely the springboard for his memories and for paintings that consider the nature of surfaces. His oil blowup “Grandpa” – all penetrating, rheumy eyes; bulbous nose; and liver spots seen in three-quarter view – is not a real pose. And perhaps, not even the real man.

“The end result is not even the existing photograph,” he says. Rather, he says, his work is “about the tension between the visible and the invisible. The liver spot stands for something you can’t really see.”

The art of science

You have to wonder what Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, embattled challenger of female scientific prowess, would make of Anjali Deshmukh, a 26-year-old student at the Rhode Island school of Design in Providence. Her painting “Circle=Lines, Unborn Inclusive” looks like so many brightly colored ganglia, created mainly in timed cycles of 40 minutes each. Her graph-like “Auto Generation” another oil on panel, is a geneology of colors, with Deshmukh mixing hues to create new ones.

The painter, who’s been known to draw inspiration from Einstein’s general theory of relativity, is fascinated by science’s theories and proofs, which she likens to the symbolic relationship between mythology and the material world. (That is, we observe something in nature, create a story to explain it and the story becomes attached to nature itself.) Yet as an undergraduate at Amherst College in Amherst, Mass., this Maryland native didn’t major in art or science.

“I read a lot of literature,” she says, everything from Gothic novels to postwar fiction.

Deshmukh says she wants to show her work more and perhaps have an artist’s residency. But this onetime advocate for the homeless and AmeriCorps volunteer would also like to use her art in service of a wider public.

Iron butterfly

Not many people associate steel with laciness. But then, not many people are hairdresser turned veterinary nurse turned welder turned Purchase College professor of sculpture Cal Lane.

“Welding is a lot like sewing,” says Lane, whose model looks belie her 36 years. “They have the same intricacy”.

So does Lane’s current work. Her “Dirt Lace”, consisting of filigree patterns created out of earth on a gallery floor, evokes so many images – from welcome mats to wrought-iron benches to wedding veils.

Whether working in dirt or metal, she says, “I like to use lace imagery, because a lot of people can connect with it.”

Lane, who’s also been a blacksmith in her native Nova Scotia, would like to open a welding workshop just for women.

“I was a construction worker,” she says, “and I didn’t like being the only woman on the crew.”

Lane has found there is both strength, and delicacy, in numbers.

The science of art

So Greg Smith, you have a PhD in physics from Harvard. Now what?

“I knew two years before I graduated that physics wasn’t going to do it for me,” says Smith, 34. So toward the end of his PhD program, in 1999, he took his first art class. Drawing went well enough. But sculpting made him realize how much he enjoyed working with his hands and in three dimensions.

Today, Smith works with his hands in more ways than one. In his video “Shrug and the Cakeman”, he is Shrug, concocter of confectionary contraptions, as well as the Cakeman, who takes Shrug’s rejects and uses them to decorate himself, quite literally. (That’s Smith covered in green and yellow buttercream.)

Like a snake shedding his skin, the Cakeman then leaves behind his costume – a green blob of a sculpture topped with a chef’s hat.

It’s all about how potentially antagonistic relationships can become complimentary and mutually beneficial. And it’s pretty funny as Smith thrusts a long, bony, green-colored foot at the camera like the Jolly Green Giant.

Though Smith – who received his MFA from Hunter College in Manhattan in January — says he still thinks like a scientist, he’s happy that science’s loss is art’s gain.

“In physics, you have to be right,” he says. “In art, there is no right. And that’s very freeing.”

Reach Georgette Gouveia at ggouveia@thejournalnews.com or 914-694-5088.

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