Urban: Group Photo Exhibit and Paintings by Paul Schuchman
Photographers: Art Murphy, Martin Rich, Harry Wilks, Kim McLean, Elliott Kaufman, Laura Resen and Peter Liepke
April 18, 2013 through May 26, 2013
Carrie Haddad Gallery is pleased to exhibit “Color Theory”, 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. These seven photographers offer distinctly different urban views—romantic, abstracted, reflected, repetitive, even “re-imagined” cities. The work will be on view April 18th through May 26th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, April 20th from 6-8 PM. All are welcome. Paul Schuchman is a self-taught artist living in Hudson. Several years ago he retired as a cataloguer at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York. He 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 Josef Albers’ color theory. Basic color theory teaches that optical sensations can be created by using particular color combinations and changing their arrangement and proportion. Schuchman explores these subtleties by painting with illuminated pigments (pale violet/naples yellow, cerulean blue/orange, red/green) so that the colors appear to float within the narrow panels. 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.
A pronounced spatial ambiguity also 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 a MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
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 the 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 these 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. His work has won prizes and recognition and has been published, exhibited and collected. 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.