Three of the four artists in this year’s 2023 Mohawk-Hudson Regional Invitational at Albany Center Gallery observe and dissect the world on the way to making their art, which shines without commentary, in two dimensions. The fourth artist turns to imaginary nonsense and serves as a cheerful counterpoint in three dimensions.
In this way, the show does what every year it manages so well: It expands on the work of a handful of artists plucked from last year’s Mohawk-Hudson Regional, which is necessarily diffuse and filled with discontinuity. Here, cohesion is evident, even with the one outlier, partly because of a crisp, controlled finish everywhere.
The most obviously deconstructive pieces are the mixed-media collages of Genève Brossard. Using a photographic print as a base, the artist amended the surfaces with incongruous elements that structurally work against the perspective of their inherent pictorial spaces. “Maybe Just Some Tape #3” uses a pair of brightly saturated images of a desert as the basis, with a geometric object rising up in one like a crude plywood statue. Added layers of clear and blue tape complicate the view, demanding that we see the collage as a made object.
Brossard has a number of these kinds of layered works, each quite different from the next. “Maybe Just Some Tape #5” reaches an involved and intriguing level, guiding our eye down a curving staircase with added tape and plastic obstructing our view, making you want to look all the more.
2023 Mohawk-Hudson Regional Invitational
When: through June 2
Where: Albany Center Gallery, 488 Broadway, Albany
Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday
Admission: Free
Info: or 518-462-4775
The works by Rita MacDonald are more inwardly refined. Her pencil drawings of floorboards are literal, flat copies of the world, looking at first like rubbings of textured wood planks, but wielding a harder, drawn precision. More intriguing are other drawings that hover between observation and invention. “Cross Stripe 2” looks at first like neatly draped fabric, with the lines suggesting a broad undulation. Looking closer, they become merely lines, in roughly parallel stripes, creating an illusion of shape and depth.
Tania Alvarez’s paintings also work with space and line, but with color and a sense of architectural detail. Three tiny square paintings give us only fragments of old buildings, so “Gable” depicts a small patch of a simple wooden exterior, and “Pause” brilliantly catches the corner of a window, detailing the frame as well as a sliver of a view of nature through an opening. The larger and mysterious “365 Days Later” depicts an enclosed, warm interior of yellow tiles, with a blue sky out a window. A hanging curtain with fine vertical stripes implies the option for privacy, but also suggests isolation and emptiness.
Alvarez finds a visual logic to what we see in ordinary places much as MacDonald does, but she adds a sense of being there, of subjectivity, and of emotional weight.
Which brings us to the wall-hung, 3D clay works by Melinda McDaniel, which are absurdist, fun objects. Their glossy glazes and pink and white figures sometimes conjoin multiple animal parts, or employ a coffee mug for an animal’s head, in ways that are not disturbing because they are playful enough to segue into silliness.
There is a confined range of ideas here, and of similar little flags stuck into many of the works, creating a simple repeating motif throughout the gallery. Which leads through the other works creating a larger, warm experience. This is not a demanding show, but it’s strangely pleasant and quite assured, proving itself in many small ways throughout.