Backbone > Lucid Dreaming
The Road Less Traveled


photo by Dick Crenson

I grew up in a neighborhood that had its streets named after 19th century poets. From the reasonably well-known (Browning, Shelley, Ruskin) to the obscure (Aldrich, Halleck), I was surrounded by a subliminal poetry of the lanes and avenues that mapped out the territory of my youth. But as a kid, all that had very little to do with my world. The primary arterial path out of my backyard was the nameless alley running between Whittier and Holmes. Little more than a stony path wide enough for one car to pass through, it provided a handy way to network through the backyards of all the neighbors’ houses, whose personal predilections (from finicky gardening to Weimaraners) we all knew like the back of our hands.

Grownups don’t usually relate to alleys quite the same way. When we moved back to my hometown a few years ago, I almost never found myself in the alley behind the house we were living in—it was mostly a place to leave the garbage cans once a week. The secret life of the marginal road barely ever registered in my consciousness.
When talking about art, one of the first questions that usually comes up is: What medium does the artist use? In reality, the answer for most serious contemporary art is the same: human consciousness. Whether we’re looking at a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, or what-have-you, the work of the artist consists in opening up an aspect of the world to the communal view of his/her audience. The individual aesthetic decisions (what colors to use, how to frame up the composition, what materials to bind into the work) each serve to map out a path—or a series of potential paths—for the viewer to think about, figure out, consider, and reconsider.

These two threads, the alley and the mental path, converge through the end of this month in Hudson. Time and Space Limited co-founder Linda Mussman has curated an interactive, ever-changing, almost performative exhibition that centers itself on the margin, that is, on the 200-year-old alleys that dart through nearly every block in the town. The significance (at least from the “grownup” perspective) is to focus on the things that normally lie on the edges of perception, those little things that dog peripheral vision, the stuff that is normally overlooked in the course of the day. Over two dozen artists are contributing photographs, paintings, sculptures, and video work, much of it site-specific, including ongoing documentary of “alley sightings” of people, animals, architecture, graffiti, and signs.

Curator Mussman put out the word about this exhibition well in advance, but even she was surprised at the depth (not to mention sheer volume) of response. She says that some artists had been working, on and off, in the alleys for six months or even a year before the opening in June, including a number of artists who don’t even live in Hudson. The results of all this activity continue to arrive at the TSL gallery daily. Mussman says that, among other things, she wanted to do away with the preciousness of the exhibition space. By accumulating so much stuff, ranging from a huge number of photographs to paintings to sculpture to various artifacts she collected in the alleys, including pieces of disused picket fence, gates, tin roofing, and weathered barn shakes, which are all crammed cheek-by-jowl into the space, there is no hope of mistaking this gallery for the usual, sterile “white cube space.” One recent addition is a pair of `50s-era metal lawn chairs, which apparently were never brought in out of the weather from the day they were purchased. They now appear in the space as sentinels of spontaneous sculpture, in all their rusted glory.

The inspiration for the exhibition came from Mussman’s observation of the back of a property on an alley near the TSL Warehouse. She observed a door that, whether out of lack of money or sheer thriftiness, seemed to progressively accumulate four or five padlocks for security over time, and as the hinges wore out or became partly detached from the panel, more new hinges of various descriptions were simply added. Instead of replacing the door with a new one, the property’s resident continuously improvised solutions to maintain its function. It struck Mussman that this was largely how the liminal world of the alleyways operated—by accident more than by design. And in fact, this is the very logic that drives the exhibition itself, resulting in a special type of chaos in the gallery that does not make any sort of didactic point (although there are contributions from writers like urban planner Roberta Gratz making a case for the importance of alleys in humanizing space), but rather, as Mussman hopes, that inspires viewers to “go outside and have a walk” to see the alleys themselves. Having opened in the beginning of June, this process of the accretion of artistic attention will continue through the end of July.

A more conventional exhibition strategy is used for the current show at the Gallery at R&F, a beautiful series of encaustics by Judith Hoyt. Hoyt strikes an interesting balance between the impromptu and the planned in these works, which begins with a pile of paper fragments and cloth that she’s collected, including blueprints, ledger pages, written notations, pattern pieces, and pages from what are apparently mostly 19th century books. She then assembles these fragments into recognizable, largely figurative forms, sublimating the excess, the sheer abundance represented by her wide range of pre-used materials to the architecture of bodies that remind me of the caricatures of German Expressionist George Grosz. The resulting composition is then coated with a thin layer of nearly transparent encaustic wax, which preserves the scraps of paper and cloth beneath it, while also “transparentizing” the paper itself, revealing the type on the reverse of the page in unexpected passages. Hoyt then strategically scratches lines into the surface of the wax to reinforce the underlying forms, and in the most effective pieces, actually stitches through it with what appears to have been a sewing machine set on a wide zigzag, piercing the otherwise pristine wax surface. The result is an incredibly sophisticated layering of materials, images, and ideas, which is well worth careful, even meditative consideration.

> “TSL/Hudson Alley Project 2002,” through July at Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia Street, Hudson. (518) 822-8448; www.timeandspace.org.

> Encaustic Collages by Judith Hoyt, through July 27 at The Gallery at R&F, 506 Broadway, Kingston. 331-3112.