Recently, Cath and I had the opportunity to head down to New York state to attend the opening of “Emerging Artists 2009″ at the Limner Gallery in Hudson, of which I was a contributor. They’d picked a rather risque piece of mine and, since the gallery was just a drive away (7 hours), we thought we would go there and see how it fit in with the rest of the show. Here’s how things went…

The drive itself was long but uneventful. The border guard at the Peace Bridge crossing was really nice and enthused when she found out we were going to see an artshow in which I had a painting. “That’s exciting,” I believe were her exact words.

After crossing the border, we saw the last of the Tim Hortons that have been brave enough to penetrate into the U.S. slide away. They made way for service centre after service centre stocked with good ole’ american chow: meat on a bun and deep fried everything. This was pretty daunting for a couple of would be vegetarians. Cath was very brave when she ate a South West Chicken sandwich from a Roy Rogers (kinda like a KFC but with a selection of dead animals, not just chicken). No vomiting ensued.

As it usually happens on long trips in a car when you’re not the driver, Cath slept away a good deal of the distance. It didn’t help that we were up a five a.m. and on the road by six. She was just tuckered out, bless her heart! It was okay. I had CD’s and an infinite number of American radio stations tuning in and fading out to static to keep me company. We counted 24 hawks perched by the highway as we went. They seemed to emote, “We’re hawks and you’re not. So there.” as they sat stoically surveying the surrounding woods and looking down upon us. We also saw a bunch of deer when crossing through the Adirondack mountains. They were safely behind a fence, living in a wildlife preserve.

I was personally surprised to see how like northern Canada upper New York State is. Bedrock climbs high on either side of the roadway in many places and the woods go on forever. If it had been summertime, I’m sure all the greenery and foliage would have made it a very beautiful drive.

The New York Thruway was well put together. It was unfortunately a toll road but it was still awesome and in the grand scheme of things, paying the toll was ultimately cheaper than flying. Also, the exit closest to our destination put us at the doorstep of the hotel I had booked for us to stay at–The Quality Inn. We arrived just after 1 p.m. and the man at the desk was kind enough to let us check-in without paying an early check-in fee. It seems the recession is hitting hard everywhere. We were staying there with only a handful of other people; not a time to anger would be clients with an early check-in fee.

The hotel was technically in a town called Leeds (although it sat alone by the thruway) and was just a skip and a jump across the Hudson River from the town of Hudson where the show was. After chilling at the hotel for a moment in our non-smoking room that smelled of smoke, Cath and I jumped back in the car and headed for the show. We crossed the Rip Van Winkle Bridge (a toll bridge; what’s with tolls in the U.S. anyway?) and, after negotiating a few roads that were like a bowl of cooked spaghetti, we found ourselves in the quaint town of Hudson.

What a place. Talk about a town of extremes. I believe technically there are only about 8,000 people living in or around the town of Hudson. That makes it twice as big as my hometown of Orono, Ontario. It had startling contrasts between high-art and down-and-out which were quite confounding.

On the one hand Hudson had many art galleries such as the Limner Gallery, the Deffebach gallery, the Hudson Opera House (serving partially as a gallery) and the Carrie Haddad gallery, all of which we visited. There were also many nicely done up coffee houses, cafes and restaurants as well as boutique style shops and antique stores which I’m sure sold just about everything anyone could be looking for.

On the other hand there were many derelict shops and closed up storefronts peppered in amongst those that prospered, with the obligatory ramshackle corner conveniences and 30 year old businesses that had just never bothered to do a make-over. We even saw an old church that was abandoned and boarded up. It would probably make a wonderful home and storefront if someone was willing to give it a facelift.

When it came to people, the differences were just as glaring. We saw folks dressed up to the nines, out for a stroll, doing a little antiquing. One lady was wearing a lavish fur coat! Cath and I were also dressed up sharply. How often does one get to go out to a show where their work is on display?

We also saw a few folks who looked like they were hoping to attain the designation of ’slightly rough’ some day. Some down-on-their-luck teenagers with newborns passed us at one point, giving us the evil eye. There was also a crew of would-be gangstas just down the block from the Limner, hovering around a car blaring hip-hop, involving themselves in a bipedal fashion with the traffic that had to stop at the corner. Talk about a town of opposites.

One of the places we spent some time at was the Hudson Opera House. Twelve artists had their work on display in a show entitled “Marking Time”. Most, if not all of them, were in attendance to explain a bit about their work.

We were able to catch Greg Lock talking about some digital prints he had on display. They were of a model of a barn he had created in his computer in retaliation to a real barn he had recently begrudgingly had to tear down. He’d turned off the ‘gravity’ function of this digital model and played with blowing the barn to pieces. The photographs were of the barn in various degrees of devastation.

Personally, I didn’t think his work was strong enough to stand alone, and without the lengthy explanation about their origin, the casual viewer would have been stymied as to what they were all about. His prints seemed to be part of a larger body of work in which they would have fit perfectly, had all the rest of it been there. As professionally produced as they were, good art shouldn’t need a dissertation to accompany it.

Next up was Dawn Breeze who had a couple of dreadful abstracts hanging beside Mr. Lock’s enigmatic prints. If there’s anything worse than explaining, at length, all the details viewers need to be armed with in order to enjoy your work, it’s not being able to explain it at all. The theme of the show was ‘time’ and Dawn stumbled through a wishy washy explanation about her work, trying again and again to enamour us to her paintings all the while blind us to how little, if anything, they had to do with time. Her performance only strengthened my resolve against abstract work, its lack of ‘visual’ content and how flaky its proponents are. No vomiting ensued.

Lastly, we listened to Tatana Kellner talk about her work. She was succinct and to the point which was refreshing. Her intriguingly rough portraits seem to depicted conflicted people under attack by themselves or external forces. She used just about every medium in the book from charcoal to paint to collage on a ground of weathered brown paper that made her work very emotive and visceral. Cath enjoy Tatana’s work very much.

When the time came for the opening, we were pleasantly surprised to find a number of partrons and artists in attendance. We had been in earlier in the afternoon when we’d first arrived in Hudson to introduce ourselves to the solitary gallery owner Tim Slowinski. It was nice to see some people in the gallery finally interacting with the show and each other.

Many of the artists and their friends were in attendance. We were introduced to and had a lengthy conversation with Elliott Lunson, an artist who had come all the way from Texas to be at the opening! And we thought we had travelled far (damn over-acheivers). His amazingly wide self-portrait graced the promo postcard for the show (see it at the beginning of this post). He was a very amiable gentleman and we chatted a great deal about Texas and how he didn’t sound like he was from there at all. He explained to us that his 124 inch wide painting cost over $800 (US) to ship to the gallery. Luckily, Elliott explained, there was a local Texan association that was willing to pick up the cost of having it shipped to Limner. Phew!

Both Cath and I enjoyed the show immensely, and I’m happy to say that I was glad to see my artwork hanging with the artwork of other  like-minded individuals. It’s good to be in ones element. Here I was thinking I was going to be the only artist exhibiting a painting with a penis and a vulva in it, when in fact the genital theme was quite pervasive throughout the entire show.

The piece featured to the side here is the work I had in the show.  It’s entitled “Things That Should Not Be Inside Eggs: All the Things we Love to Hate to Love” and derides misogyny in religion. The hand of God is old and decrepit and points down with scorn from the heavens at the target of its ire, femininity, sitting protected under its halo in an egg with a heart shaped fracture in it.

Since modern day society is cultured from an historical version of society, and that version of society was concocted by whichever religion was in power at the time, I believe it’s fair to say that a lot of the ideals that are still adhered to in our society were created by Religion’s direct influence.

As enlightened as we like to think we are, there is still a lot of misogyny floating around in our society. Everyone deserves to be treated with equal respect and dignity and women should not be left out from under that umbrella. With that in mind, I decided to go straight to the source and let Religion know just what I thought about its legacy of misogyny and how it is no longer needed.

I fully expected to have a bevy of feminists waiting to deride me at the gallery about my painting and their possible misinterpretation of it. I’d even done some research into the misogynistic doctrines of religion so I’d be ready to defend my artwork. Upon getting to the gallery no such reception was encountered. In fact, it was quite the opposite with people enjoying the painting if not finding it a little amusing. Thank you to everyone who tittered at my serious work. At least you enjoyed it.

To end off the evening, Cath and I headed across the street to Vico, a nice italian restaurant where apparently everything is made from scratch, even the pasta. And what a difference freshly made pasta makes. Cath had the salmon and linguini. I had the lasagna. It was a rather expensive meal but we figured it would be the only one we’d be having for the near future so why the hell not? We ate guilt free.

After that, we beetled back to the hotel to take a break. (It was now almost a fifteen hour day of go-go-go.) We watched School of Rock with Jack Black on the cable TV and laughed ourselves silly (good movie by the way). After a long day of travelling and gallery hopping and conversing and interacting, we’d earned a good night’s sleep. We turned off the light and called it a day.

To read more about our jaunt into the U.S., have a look a Cath’s take on the trip at cathrene.net

For now, that is all. Goodnight

P.S. The trip back was uneventful too. We took the same route back and had to pay a toll on the Peace Bridge coming back into Canada. Slammed by our own country. Classy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Updates . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.