The Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz
HUDSON VALLEY ARTISTS 2024: BIBLIOGRAPHY
Curated by Sophie Landres
February - April, 2024
Chandler and North
The painting, prints, video, sculpture, installation, sound, and mixed-media in Bibliography form a motley compilation. Cohesion comes only loosely from books stationed throughout the exhibition. They were selected by the artists but the reasons for the selections differ wildly. In some instances, the books supply a physical or conceptual basis for the art. More often, they serve as side doors to approach the artwork’s aesthetic, social, or political implications.
Through various styles and strategies, the art prompts consideration of topics as disparate as how information circulates and edges close to mystery, the ethics of reuse, how bodies occupy public realms or disappear from them, tactics for subverting oppressive power structures, family, and the visualization of non-visual phenomena.
The way books evoke dimensions of the artists’ thoughts is perhaps the most unifying aspect of this exhibition. Whether integrated into an installation or placed like a citation in proximity to the artwork, they offer correlations that are undetermined, unfixed, and open to interpretation.
While increasingly prevalent forms of AI use predictive neural networks to simulate human knowledge, Bibliography stakes meaning in these sets of unpredictable connections. Including books as both reference material and material objects, it adopts a bibliographical intention to share sources encountered along the way of idea formation.
Rather than corral art into what makes sense for a mindset on computational outcomes, we see ideas meandering across subjects and mediums. We see them continuously reconstrued and fundamentally communal.
Exhibiting artists include Osi Audu, Alta Buden, Shari Diamond, Kerry Downey, Stevenson Estime, eteam (Franzisa Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger), Aki Goto, Adam Henry, Matthew Kirk, Niki Kriese, Melora Kuhn, Catherine Lord, Sean Sullivan, and Audra Wolowiec.
Hudson Valley Artists 2024: Bibliography is curated by Sophie Landres. It is the Dorsky Museum’s 17th annual exhibition focused on artists who live or work in upstate New York.