Carrie Haddad Gallery’s summer offering, The Summer Show, is a playful wink and a poke to bastion of every gallery’s yearly program: the month of August. Much like the title of the show, this selection of work is self-referential and effervescent. Modernities collide in depictions of leisure, wanderlust is shown as both fantastical and intimate, and universally bold palettes are a sucker punch to the senses. Though they span an array of media, each of the artists incorporate detail with nuance and ease, their pith and wit happily imbibable. The Summer Show features Robert Goldstrom, Hue Thi Hoffmaster, Louise Laplante, Andrea Moreau, Kahn & Selesnick, and Annika Tucksmith and includes painting, collage, and photography.
Robert Goldstrom’s Summer Afternoon, Provincetown Bay (Planters) is an unmistakable reference to Seurat and leisure. He describes his painting as a “portrait of place,” honing in on light effects, color play, and shadow as physical features, shaping his composition from moments of sensation and experience. Sunshine-warmed skin, lapping waves, and salt-seasoned respiration facet together, forming precarious perfection.
Annika Tucksmith’s paintings of adolescent freedom pick up Goldstrom’s compositional capriciousness and bring it to the fore. Nocturnal scenes render these same light effects enigmatic and almost sinister; leisure laced with danger. Brought into the contemporary moment, Tucksmith complicates the function of “free-time,” imbuing it with undercurrents of tension and transition.
Kahn & Selesnick and Andrea Moreau both transfix and transport with graphic details intermeshed within fantastical realms. Though they work in entirely different media–photography and collage, respectively–both anchor their compositions with iconic figures. The composition of Kahn & Selesnick’s images gestures towards Tarot card design and medieval marginalia. Surrounded by wild, lavish plant life, the central figure, be it a hanged man or a mask-like cluster of shells, becomes a deep well of mystic power.
Moreau’s collages also emanate a totemic-like allure. Postage stamps collected from distant climes function as secret portholes in her otherwise demure compositions. The Swiss Alps, religious figures, and groves of trees spring forth from their miniature source and proliferate across her paper. One the epitome of abundance and the other spare, both depictions satisfy summer wanderlust.
Hue Thi Hoffmaster’s paintings and Louise Laplante’s collages share an element of ease and levity, bolstered by their audacious color palettes and bold simplicity of form. Laplante’s collages marry text, form, and color to create disembodied narratives. These fragments of time and feeling carry with them a sense of nostalgia; a longing for a distant, unaffected simplicity.
Through paintings, Hoffmaster’s thickly impastoed canvases appear almost as tactile strips of material. The texture of their surfaces and clarity of their geometries evoke physical discovery, and invite the viewer to be child-like in their exploration of his work. Surrounded by visual pranksters and fantasies of escapism, Hoffmaster’s and Laplante’s work are refreshingly sincere in their reach towards youthful summer.
Summer is earnest, complicated, and feverish. The artists in The Summer Show capture this amalgam unabashedly, refusing to shy away from either delight or discomfort. The Summer Show is on view at Carrie Haddad Gallery through September 25th. You can preview the exhibit online here.
CARRIE HADDAD GALLERY
Established in 1991 as the first fine art gallery in Hudson, NY, Carrie Haddad Gallery represents professionally committed artists as well as emerging talent specializing in painting, both large and small sculpture, works on paper and a variety of techniques in photography. The gallery currently has 60 artists on the roster, most of whom are local to the Hudson Valley. Occupying 3000 sq ft. on Warren Street, the gallery is located two hours north of Manhattan. The annual exhibition schedule accommodates 6 exhibits on the main floor as well as a rotating selection of artworks by represented artists on the second floor. Linden Scheff and Lena Petersen have served as Co-Directors of Carrie Haddad Gallery since 2016.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Louisa Pancoast is a dancer, choreographer, gallerist, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to her performance career, she is the Assistant Director at Garvey|Simon, and provides freelance writing services to artists whose primary mode of communication is not the written word. Louisa holds her B.A. in Art History and English Literature from New York University. Lately, she has been collaborating with an aerospace engineer, using dance to improve drone coordination and develop human-robot interactions.