: "Imaging the River," an exhibition at the Hudson River Museum on
view from October 4 through May 23, presents the Hudson River as
a natural wonder and as an inspiration for artists from the
Nineteenth Century to the present.
Employing maps, paintings and drawings from the museum's
permanent collection, the exhibition contrasts the Nineteenth
Century romantic view of the river - man and nature living
harmoniously - with works of contemporary artists who capture, in
many media, the ever-changing river.
Painters of the Hudson River School were drawn to the Hudson's
beauty and its path to the sea, framed by the Adirondacks and the
Palisades.
Contemporary artists see this same river changed in the Twentieth
Century by the nation's explosive growth. The once bountiful
Hudson landscape is for them a cautionary image of conflict
between industry and nature. The works of 23 living artists,
using video, site-specific installations, photography, painting
and sculpture, complete the contrasting picture in "Imaging the
River." While presenting the Hudson's contemplative
beauty, they also capture its degradation and its more recent
reclamation.
Artists include: Colin Barclay, Bob Braine, Jaime Davidovich, Dan
Ford, Larry Frankel, Sandy Gellis, Helen and Newton Harrison,
Maxine Henryson, Basia Irland, Susan Jennings, Alan Michelson,
Alison Moritsugu, Raquel Rabinovich, Renata Rainer, Aviva
Rahmani, Alexis Rockman, Ann Rosenthal and Steffi Domike,
Rosalind Schneider, Buster Simpson, Roy Staab, Jason Walz and
Timothy White.
"Imaging the River's" contemporary artists are motivated by
environmental and social concerns. Braine, voyager of waterways
from the Bronx River to Guyana's Mazaruni, builds his own boats
to see and record postindustrial landscapes. For "Mid Hudson
Formation," Braine traveled to Hudson locations to take infrared
aerial photographs of sites that inspired Hudson River School
artists before the sites underwent industrialization.
To produce her art, Rahmani focuses on landscape trigger points
where attention can have a restorative ripple effect on adjacent
ecology. Rahmani's installation, "Through a Glass Darkly," is a
series of paintings and a PowerPoint presentation that shows
river views from The Hudson River Museum building.
Moritsugu, a native of Hawaii, turns her interest in
environmental themes into her use of raw wood, taking classic
romantic landscapes out of familiar context and painting them on
decaying logs, to question our own ideas about nature and
artifice.
Some of "Imaging the River's" artists took inspiration from the
museum's collections and its river location. Michelson's
installation recasts a Hudson River School painting as the video
projection of a real-time river view, set against Indian Point.
Rosenthal and Domike mine the museum's postcard collection to
profile the Saw Mill River, a Hudson tributary. Going to the
postcard sites, the artists created river paintings by saturating
and staining cloth in the Saw Mill, and then produced new
postcards showing the sites as they are today.
Husband and wife Helen and Newton Harrison have created four
computer-generated map drawings of today's Hudson River Basin and
show its possible future.
"Imaging the River" was organized by the Hudson River Museum and
is accompanied by a gallery brochure. Amy Lipton was guest
curator of the exhibition.
The Hudson River Museum is at 511 Warburton Avenue. For
information, 914-963-4550, ext 218.
