Providence X Hudson: Prevailing Mysteries

curated by Manya K. Rubinstein

 

For much of its recorded history, the city of Hudson has been visited—and shaped—by outsiders. Artists have long been drawn to the natural beauty of its surrounding landscape. In recent years, more than a few artists with ties to Providence, Rhode Island (itself no slouch in the creative department) have decided to make Hudson their home. This show presents a selection of work by four women artists who currently reside in the Providence area and are part of a continuing exchange of people, art, friends and ideas that flow between New England and the Hudson Valley. The artists represented here work in different mediums but each, to varying degrees, touch on issues of mysticism, order versus chaos, and our relationship to the natural world. In a time of political and climatic upheaval, they ask us to examine how we choose to think and how much we allow ourselves to feel. Where do we draw the lines between ourselves and our environments, constructed and natural? How do we make sense of chaos in the world at large or even within our own psyche? Theresa Ganz’s ornate reimagined landscapes (created through delicate layering of photographic source material) point to the thin lines between documentation and invention, yielding an unending dance between the natural and artificial. She calls up a 19th-century romanticism and idea of women’s work in a format that is a distinctly 21st-century take on truth and representation. Jungil Hong, known for her psychedelic silkscreens and paintings, here uses woven textiles to look at how people, places, and things become markings as we move through time. The pieces were created on a Jacquard Loom, one is a “secondary sonic tapestry,” a term Hong invented to describe the process of recording the sounds of the loom, converting them into binary code, then feeding the sounds via a punch card back through the loom to create the final weaving. Tayo Heuser’s childhood, spent in North, East and West Africa, heavily influenced her visual motifs. Her process to prepare her canvases is exacting and yields beautiful results: hand-burnished, unique surfaces on which she paints and draws, layer upon layer. Her gestural lines recall energetic fields surrounding living beings, and hint at underlying structures and forms of natural phenomenon that we may not be able to see with the naked eye. Rachel Hulin, a writer as well as a fine art photographer, creates work that elevates the quotidian into the sublime, taking the minutia of the domestic and the everyday and translating them via a formal visual language of light, color and form into something deep and profound. Each artist uses the idea of translation to create patterns and structures by which we may begin to order, process, or at least approach what remains expansive and unknown. Yet ultimately, there is much that escapes these attempts; perhaps it is inevitable that some mystery still prevails. Prevailing Mysteries   October 7th – November 24th Opening Saturday October 7th, 4-6 pm