Pamela Wallace, who lives and works in Germantown but shows (and teaches) throughout Ulster County, is one of the nicest artists I know. She’s always open with her processes and inspiration and open to helping others, whether it be just studio visits and opening attendance or the curating of things such as the series of classic films that she put together for her local library last winter and spring.
As an artist working in thoughtfully intuitive sculptural pieces that comment on the forms with which we share lives, and drawings that mysteriously question the separation between two and three dimensions, Wallace’s work always has humor and depth, art-world knowing and inspired playfulness. She has got her own look and style; and while seemingly delicate, especially in installation form, her pieces have gravity (as well as play with scientific rules) and a lasting effervescence.
David Hornung teaches and writes about the arts in New York City, then retreats to his own paintings and exploration of color, form and surface texturings back at home in Ulster County. There’s the man’s criticism: gentle and yet forceful in an accumulating way. And then there are his paintings: totally original yet reflective of his years of education and observation, which blow other painters away with their distilled sensibility, the numbers of clear choices made and rendered in an effortless, completely natural manner.
“These recent pictures, all made with gouache on handmade paper, were completed in the winter and spring of 2010/2011. As usual, they depict scenes from around my home in the Catskills,” Hornung says of his latest work, much-awaited. “My usual working method is to create loose sketches from memory and imagination and then translate them into paintings. I make many adjustments and ‘corrections,’ mostly in pursuit of a nebulous but insistent sense of balance – not compositional balance, but the balance of all the various parts of a picture, including its tenuous connection to outside reality. I’m preoccupied by the distinction between fact and fiction in what is largely an artificial enterprise. You could say that I am compelled by a pictorial truth, not realism.” His work will be in Davis’ Main Gallery.
Wallace will be showing two bodies of work, one a series of collaborative works in the Davis sculpture garden with fellow sculptor Stephen Reynolds. The other is a major new installation in the Davis’ fantastically redolent elevator-shaft space.
Water Capture, the garden piece, involves two separate sculptures, each nine feet high, referencing the rotting of an industrial culture. As for the elevator shaft installation: “In Suspended So Far, Yet Somewhere Else, I am constructing a system in response to the architecture and function of this elevator shaft. For years, this elevator moved countless pounds in and out of this carriage house. I do not know what was lifted or how much weight was carried, but it is this absence of information that motivated me to produce this work,” Wallace says. “Using a system of suspended spheres, ropes, bowls and stones, I’ve created an installation that reflects on the many unknown burdens that have moved up and down in this space. Stopping this movement, I have held the platform on the bottom floor by weighing it down with small stones, forcing it, for the time being, to simply sit still.”
Also opening in solo shows will be exhibits by painters Dale Emmart and Robert C. Morgan. The various solo shows open simultaneously from 6 to 8 p.m. this coming Saturday, May 28 at John Davis Galleries, located at 362 ½ Warren Street in Hudson. Call (518) 828-5907 or visit www.johndavisgallery.com for further information. Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday from 11 till 5 p.m. The current shows stay up through June 19.
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