(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Odds & Ends, Take One, a group exhibition named for a song from The Basement Tapes, recorded by Bob Dylan and The Band in the basement at “Big Pink” — the West Saugerties, N.Y., house shared by Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson of the Band – opens at Valley Variety with an artists’ reception on Saturday, July 12, at 6pm and runs through September 7, 2014. Artists represented in the show – which “riffs on the idea of Upstate as a state of mind, a refuge, an escape—illusory or not” – include Peter Acheson, Susan Meyer, Jill Shoffiett, and Jeff Starr.

Each artist in the show responds to visual, psychological and actual terrain; the combination creates a patchwork of disparate truths. An essay by Cydney Payton will accompany the exhibition. An independent curator based in San Francisco, Payton was Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver from 2001–2008.

Peter Acheson lives in Ghent, N.Y., having spent the mid-1980s to the early ‘90s in Williamsburg. In a Brooklyn Rail piece on Acheson’s recent solo exhibition, Rusted Giacometti at Novella Gallery LES, John Yao wrote, “Then, the work follows Peter into the woods, through his move upstate, where he continues to practice, witness to babbling brooks, nature’s uninterrupted cycles, and the occasional gnome sighting”.  Acheson’s work is in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection; he has exhibited widely. Acheson graduated with a B.F.A. from Yale University in 1976.

Susan Meyer makes environments and sculptures that explore tensions between the communal and individual.  Exhibitions include Plato’s Retreat at Plus Gallery, Denver, CO and Art Aqua, Miami and Biennial Blowout and Elegy: Contemporary Ruins, both at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. Meyer graduated with a B.S. from Skidmore College and a M.F.A. from Boston Museum School and Tufts University. She lives in Hudson, N.Y. and teaches at The College of Saint Rose.

Jill Shoffiett lives in Cold Springs, N.Y. Shoffiett’s meticulous watercolors reflect “the cultural and religious landscape” of her native Mississippi. These utopian/dystopian landscapes are a “union of memory and narrative”. Shoffiett graduated from Pratt Institute with a M.F.A. in Painting. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2007. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and Art in America. She has shown in numerous venues including the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Jeff Starr lives in Hudson, N.Y.  Recent paintings explore the conflation of pop imagery, abstraction and obsessive doodling. Exhibitions include Smile at Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO, The Wrath of Grapes, a solo at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver and Decades of Influence, Biennial Blowout and Colorado Biennial 10 + 10 also at the MCA/Denver. Starr received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship in 1987. His work is in the collection of the Denver Art Museum.

ODDS & ENDS, take one was organized for Valley Variety by Susan Meyer and Jeff Starr.