La Wilson: Constructions at John Davis Gallery with Ben Butler in Sculpture Garden and Harry Leigh, William Jaeger, Claude Carone, and Laurel Sucsy in Carriage House
La Wilson: Constructions
John Davis Gallery
362 1/2 Warren Street
Hudson, New York 12534
Thursday, October 12th, La Wilson will open a solo exhibition at the John Davis Gallery. The work will be on display through November 5th with a reception for the artist on Saturday, October 14th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.
John Davis began showing the work of La Wilson in 1983 in Akron, Ohio and continued with Ms. Wilson when his gallery moved to New York City. Including the 2004 retrospective that Mr. Davis curated, La Wilson Altered Objects (at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College), this upcoming show will be the 12th exhibition of Ms. Wilson’s work that the artist and dealer have presented together. It will also mark Ms. Wilson’s fourth exhibition in Hudson, New York, (the first, having been recognized and reviewed in The New York Times). She visits Hudson, New York from Hudson, Ohio where she lives and works and she has shown extensively in the mid-west and New York City.
Ms. Wilson was given a retrospective of her work at The Akron Art Museum in 1986/1987 titled La Wilson Metaphorical Objects with the sharp vision of director, Mitchell D. Kahan, curator, Kathleen M. Monaghan with the late Ellen H. Johnson’s contribution to the catalogue. In 1992 Tom Hinson, curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum, chose a group of La’s works to exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1993, the artist received the top award for sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art May Show. It was in this same year that La was awarded the prestigious “Cleveland Arts Prize in Visual Arts” for sculpture. In 2004 the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College (Collegeville, Pennsylvania) mounted a retrospective of her work, titled La Wilson Altered Objects with catalogue essay by Edward M. Gomez, curated by John Davis.
In the current body of work, La Wilson continues to confound those who have watched her development as an artist over the years with her ability to defy the material and transform everyday objects into visual delights that convey profound meaning and sustenance. In her words, “I try to steer clear of objects that are too loaded with meaning; but then, when I think about it, everything I use is loaded - snakes, pencils, firecrackers, matches, hair pins. What I try to do is free myself from the conscious associations so that the unconscious ones can take over. I am much more interested in what I don’t know than what I do know.”
Sculpture Garden:
Ben Butler will be the featured sculptor in the garden in October/November. Ben, who grew up mostly in Winnetka, Illinois, and now lives on Long Island, was interested in math and science as a teenager, and in college he considered a double major in art and neuroscience. He ended up majoring in art, and in 2003 also got an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ben feels that all things, under close enough observation, will reveal the complete stories of their making. His objects simply reveal themselves much more readily than most, and therefore hope to teach us something about looking.
The spirit of science, of discover and illumination, is central to his art. Ultimately, everything made is first found. Yet, for both art and science, successful work must allow others not to simply rediscover what the artist has discovered, but to make, through the work, their own discoveries. Then, he feels, the work remains alive.
Carriage House:
There are four artists within the carriage house: Harry Leigh, William Jaeger, Claude Carone, and Laurel Sucsy
There will be an installation of a sculpture by Harry Leigh In the elevator shaft of the Carriage House. Mr. Leigh was born in 1931 in Buffalo, New York, his father a cotton-spinner and immigrant from Manchester, England, his mother, a farm girl from the finger lake district. He was educated in the public school system and attended Albright Art School and SUNY, Buffalo, where he received his B.A. in 1953.
Harry worked as a laborer on construction sites, in steel mills, and on the assembly line of Ford Motor Company. He was drafted into the Army in 1954 and trained as a radio operator. While serving in Europe, he traveled extensively, visiting museums and architectural sites.
Upon return, he studied on the GI bill for a Masters of Art at Columbia University. He studied privately with Richard Pousette-Dart (1956-1960) in painting. He also took a course with Peter Volkus in clay sculpture. While painting from 1955-65, he began experimenting with large works from cardboard, plaster, then plywood in 1960. His sculpture became his main focus with his first solo exhibition representing a full assimilation of his diverse work experiences.
Also on the ground floor of the carriage house, there is a group exhibition of other gallery sculptors: John Van Alstine, John Ruppert, Jon Isherwood, and Solin-Iacone.
William Jaeger
The Edge of Darkness
William Jaeger received his M.F.A. in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1984. In addition to his photographic work, Mr. Jaeger is also a writer, having been the art critic for the Albany Times Union and, at present, New York Editor/contributor to Art New .
Mr. Jaeger explains, “My process can seem complicated if I think about it too much, but in short, I photograph what I find. The images here might have documentary, formal, or even (happily) poetic elements, but those are elements I can only intuitively understand. When I take a photograph, the event is something I don’t really want to probe beyond the results, which are here for you to approach much as I did.”
Claude Carone began his studies in New York at the New York Studio School but he was no stranger to art at that time, having grown up with a father who was a major contributor to the Abstract Expressionist school, Nicolas Carone, a contemporary and comrade of Jackson
Pollock, William de Kooning, and other founding fathers of the abstract expressionist movement. After the New York Studio School, Claude continued his education at the Maryland Institute of Art and then, independently, in Rome, . He has exhibited in various cities in , , and the .
Carone is an intuitive painter. He may start a canvas with a gesture and then respond to that gesture with another until he sees and feels the beginning of a visual composition. As he goes back to a painting, he may re-enter into a situation that he then plays into or finds a certain rhythm in the painting or a dialogue between the image and the space and respond to it. He paints on wooden panels with casein, powdered pigment, polymer and wax. The resulting work is sometimes brooding and always energetic painting that emanates from his ability to tap the unconscious and let his body channel these emotions into a rhythmic and dynamic composition.
Laurel Sucsy is the newest edition to the roster of artists in the John Davis Gallery. She has an M.F.A. in Painting from the Tyler School of Art In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work will be on display on the top floor of the Carriage House.
The paintings emerge as a moving back and forth between physical and conceptual settings as she negotiates the questions of where things appear and where they are expected to be found. By establishing rules and then breaking those rules, she choreographs an exchange between color, light and edge. In this way, she offers proximity to the visible and to the unseen.
Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 10:00 till 5:30 p.m. For further information about the gallery, the artists and upcoming exhibition, visit