Art and Allusion

Heart and Lungs, Mimi Czajka Graminski

The lede for most of the stories about the Kingston Sculpture Biennial this year will focus on its most overtly intriguing venue: a series of installations and performances at the former Ulster County Jail on Golden Hill. As curator of the exhibition, it has certainly been one of the more exciting elements of the show to put together—every time I made a visit to the facility in the company of various artists, invariably they walked out the front door bursting with ideas, inspired to do one thing or another or another.

The secret of the jail’s allure (to viewers and artists alike) lies largely in the emotional energy resonating through the place—the dynamic of discipline and punishment, of transgression and confinement, of power and powerlessness.

It’s a heady environment, to say the least, and the work resulting from this place magnifies and channels that energy in a number of different ways—looking at the jail as dysfunctional social institution (Sam Sebren), jail as life metaphor (Linda Montano), jail as bleak backdrop for hope (Don Bruschi). Without a doubt, the sheer intensity of experience available at the jail is unmatched anywhere else in the Biennial.

But to focus on the jail at the expense of the (many) other varieties of artistic/aesthetic experience available in this wide-ranging exhibition would be a great mistake. As we put the show together, we encouraged artists to think about and create work made specifically for Kingston—itself a city of many identities, different communities, and widely varying topographies, in many ways an astonishing cross-section of contemporary American society, given the relatively modest size of the city. As a result, there is work that seeks to insinuate itself into the urban landscape (Sarah Mecklem, Denise Orzo, and Franc Palaia), or that reflects something of the history of Kingston (Anthony Krauss), or that underscores the spectacular appeal of the Hudson River landscape (Shelley Parriott, Basha Ruth Nelson).

In a public art exhibition of this scale, there is plenty of room to offer a range of entry points for the many different kinds of people that will be its audience. Steve Heller’s life-size T. Rex, welded together from found metal, looms, Jurassic Park-fashion, at the intersection of Chandler Drive and Albany Avenue, is bound to be a crowd-pleaser. Naomi Teppich has added a fantastically oversized cactus form just outside the Forsyth Park Nature Center, appealing to children of all ages.

A more traditional approach to sculpture is found in beautiful carved stone works by Kevin Van Hentenryck, Christopher Lewis, and Bradford Graves. Similarly, Alejandro Dron makes a powerful formal statement, in monumental painted steel, with his enormous abstract sculpture near Lucas Avenue in Forsyth Park. Karl Saliter’s Rondouts gambols down the rolling hills of Hasbrouck Park, both playful and monumental.