(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Color Panels, a series of color study paintings by Paul Schuchman, and Urban, a group photography exhibit featuring work by Kim McLean, Art Murphy, Elliott Kaufman, Laura Resen, Martin Rich, Peter Liepke and Harry Wilks, are on display at Carrie Haddad Gallery through Sunday, May 26, 2013. The seven photographers included in Urban offer distinctly different urban views – romantic, abstracted, reflected, repetitive, even “re-imagined” cities.
Paul Schuchman is a self-taught artist living in Hudson. Several years ago he retired as a librarian/cataloguer at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York. Schuchman now devotes his time to painting and the study of the aesthetics of color and design. The “color panels” are carefully rendered bands of color outlined in “contrasting” narrower bands of color based on Goethe’s theory of color. Schuchman paints with pure pigments (pale violet/naples yellow, cerulean blue/orange, red/green) so that the colors appear to float within the narrow panels.
Urba, focuses on views of cities, factories, residences and anything urban. Most works are presented as digital prints, with the exception of several bi-chromate albumen prints.
A pronounced spatial ambiguity exists in Kim McLean’s virtual worlds created from digitally reconstructed images. In Postignano, the famed Italian hill town is “re-imagined” using an architectural software program. A process of rich visual layering superimposes the telephone directory pages over building block forms to create an imagined world. McLean has worked as a graphic designer, artists’ fabricator and professor of 3-D Design. He holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
The elegance of structural engineering is evident in Harry Wilks’ abstracted views of roads and bridges. Highline #41 is a particularly poignant image of geometric black and white painted storage containers on the transformed West Side Highway with the city skyline in fog as backdrop.
Art Murphy has always been interested in the past, focusing on industrial archeological studies of New York and other abandoned sites. In this exhibit he documents the “Romanticism” tucked away in corners of the city. His haunting images of Ellis Island and the city market at Hunts Point bring to mind the now-lost Paris of French photographer Eugene Atget.
Elliott Kaufman observes light and how the environment, whether built or natural, is altered by the movement of light. In this series, he captures the energized “street dance” of the city, the movement, the multiple sequences, and the refracted light of the Hudson River. Kaufman sees the rhythms of architecture as influential to his imagery of time.
Laura Resen blurs the interior and exterior worlds in photographs shot through gridded windows onto a blue-tinged cityscape reflecting back into the interior. Resen has a fine art degree from Cooper Union and has worked in the photography world since 1982. Distinguished in the commercial, editorial, and art worlds, her work has been commissioned and collected by many corporations, art dealers and collectors.
Peter Liepke’s platinum palladium prints washed with gum bichromate and printed on watercolor paper are taken with a 100-year-old Graflex sheet film camera. He celebrates the roots of photography in its purest form and strives to create a mood of reverie. These images evoke a daydream in an urban setting.
Martin Rich is interested in the ever-changing nature of the built environment. Structures over time become weathered, altered by repairs, repainted, and take on new uses. These changes affect how they are seen in a certain light of day at different points in time. For over 40 years, Rich has been working with photographs as a visual tool and an art form.
The thread running through these photographs is light in all its forms – pure, direct or fractured — as it moves through the urban landscape, real or imagined.
Carrie Haddad Gallery is located at 622 Warren Steet, Hudson, N.Y.
Tel. 518.828.1915