Screen Play: Hudson Valley Artists 2013 opens at Dorsky Museum on June 22

NEW PALTZ – Screens, whether in hands, vehicles, or rooms, have become a nearly ubiquitous interface. In Screen Play, the annual exhibition of Hudson Valley Artists at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz, 15 artists respond to or use screens as a material, process, or metaphor. Screen Play: Hudson Valley Artists 2013 opens Saturday, June 22 and runs through Nov. 10, 2013 in The Dorsky Museum’s Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery and North Gallery. The public opening reception is 5 to 7 p.m. Saturday, June 22.

Screens as varied as textiles, painted canvases, projected images, and digital monitors serve as poetic and practical means to translate pictures from one realm to another. Five of the exhibiting artists—Patrick Kelley, Rachel Rampleman, Steve Rossi, Adie Russell, and Jonathan Wang—use video in vivid new ways. Photographs by Linda Kuehne and prints by Shanti Grumbine incorporate screens into their process. LoVid and Adriana Farmiga turn digital hardware into sculptural media. Vernon M. Byron III, Abshalom Jac Lahav, and Harvey Weiss investigate contemporary portraiture as mediated by movies and commercial advertising. Contemporary design and craft is explored in ceramic plates by Amy Brenner, a fiber work by K. Velis Turan, and monumental painting by Diann Bauer.

“Collapsing the differences of hard and soft and digital and analog, the screen becomes a unifying surface upon which we project and receive memories and desires,” says Daniel Belasco, the Dorsky Museum’s curator of exhibitions and programs, who organized the exhibition. “I have long been interested in the ways that screens have infiltrated our daily lives and mediate our interactions with the world. For the artists selected in this show, screens are being used to bring us together or to assert a degree of control over the media-based images that surround us.”

This is the fifth year that the Hudson Valley Artists Annual Purchase Award of $3,000 will be used to acquire one or more artworks from the exhibition for the museum’s permanent collection. This Purchase Award is made possible through the Alice and Horace Chandler Art Acquisition Fund. Artists whose work has been purchased in the
past include Charles Geiger, Curt Belshe and Lise Prown, Francois Deschamps, Gilbert Plantinga, Thomas Sarrantonio, and Eliza Pritzker.

ABOUT THE HUDSON VALLEY ARTIST SERIES

For over 20 years, the annual Hudson Valley Artists exhibition has been one of the Dorsky Museum’s signature exhibitions. It is curated from an open call for emerging and mid-career artists with a permanent mailing address and active art practice in Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster, and Westchester counties who have not had a major one-person museum exhibition and who do not have an exclusive contract with a commercial gallery. Students are not eligible. Previous curators include Connie Butler and Gary Sangster, Thom Collins, Gretchen Keyworth, Denise Markonish, Brian Wallace, and Linda Weintraub.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM

The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, located at SUNY New Paltz, is fast gaining wide recognition as the premier public showplace for exhibition, education, and cultural scholarship about the Hudson Valley region’s art and artists from yesterday and today. With more than 9,000 square feet of exhibition space distributed over six galleries, the Dorsky Museum is one of the largest museums within the SUNY system. The Dorsky was officially dedicated on Oct. 20, 2001. Since then it has presented over 100 exhibitions, including commissions, collection-based projects, and in-depth studies of artists including Robert Morris, Alice Neel, Judy Pfaff, and Carolee Schneemann.

For more information about The Dorsky Museum and its programs, visit
http://www.newpaltz.edu/museum, or call 845-257-3844.