Beauty, nightmares and characteristic weirdness

(Photo Above): A wall of particularly nightmarish paintings. Photo by Colin Dabkowski

By Colin Dabkowski

Inside the art world there here are few events as tedious as the dreaded members exhibition. They are the artistic equivalent of oil changes: dutiful exercises in reputation maintenance designed to keep membership fees trickling in and the host organization sputtering along for another year.

The Hallwalls Members Exhibition is not like this. The Hallwalls Members Exhibition, as usual, is thrilling.

Only some of the exhibit’s thrill (12 percent?) derives from the fact that the Hallwalls’ 50^th anniversary approaches: an impressive achievement for the alternative arts organization named after the corridors of the former Essex Street icehouse where its famous founders’ artworks once hung. Hallwalls endures by perching itself at the vanguard of creative expression and routinely bucking conventional curatorial wisdom.

Which is why, when a former colleague called to ask if I would be interested in picking up my notebook after a long break from arts writing, 341 Delaware Ave. was my first stop. The current show is the largest annual exhibit in its history, what curator John Massier called “277 individual, iconoclastic paths toward personal expression, across ideas and media.” Remarkably, given the spatial limitations of Hallwalls’ gallery, the exhibition does not feel overstuffed.

In this perennial celebration of idiosyncrasy, each cluster of artworks contains a thousand permutations of meaning, a thousand tiny screens upon which to project your fear, loathing, hope or sadness. This, of course, is true of any installation, in any museum or gallery. But one of the things that makes Hallwalls’ stab at the tired members show structure so engaging is its thoughtful juxtaposition of established masters with amateur artists, of strange experiments with displays of virtuosic skill.

In one representative hanging, a nightmare canvas of blood-red hues by MJ Myers (above, left) converses ably with its surroundings: a ruddy, visceral abstraction by Charlotte Raines that might be a detailed blowup of one section of Myers’ painting; there’s a terrifying painting of what would appear to be a psychopathic bunny by Barbara Hart, certainly up to no good; and Kathleen Shandraw’s disconcerting painting of a featureless, otherworldly figure with blood oozing from its right eye (I think the bunny inflicted the wound).

Each of these figures could be characters in the same nightmare, perhaps hiding somewhere
deep within in Myers’ commanding hellscape depicting Joe Biden eating ice cream against a backdrop of parachuting aid packages under a Chaim Soutine-esque sky of flayed meat. Bethany Krull’s trifurcated snake (above, right) welcomes visitors to the gallery.

This sort of inveterate, unapologetic weirdness, is part of what makes Hallwalls so compelling. Elsewhere we get more demure groupings, often arranged by tone or color and often resolutely more optimistic than the wall of nightmares.

Other highlights include a cyan-tinted painting of a Love Canal home by Dana Murray Tyrrell, (99^th Street, from the Love Canal Series, above left), and a parting gift from the recently deceased watercolorist Rita Argen Auerbach depicting a sweltering scene from the Allentown Art Festival.

William C. Maggio’s stunning “The Other Side” includes a drawn, female figure in an arctic scene (above center), and David Buck’s “vilidian II” (above right) is a swooping oil and graphite portrait of a dejected female figure. Haley Indorato’s “urge #2” (left) is a masterful portrait of a heavily tattooed figure against a verdigris background flecked with grey.

Sculptural and mixed-media highlights include Evan Hawkins’ 2016 outcropping of ruddy driftwood and LED lights and Gary Sczerbaniewicz’ cast-resin sculpture of a bright purple tardigrade suspended over a wrinkled skin.

As Hallwalls Visual Arts Curator Massier said, the annual members show “is not really a celebration of Hallwalls but of the community within which it resides.” The depth and breadth of our creative community is the true draw of the show, aided by a thoughtful and effective curatorial display. Western New York brims with creativity, and Hallwalls’ commitment to showcasing it is worthy of celebrating.

Massier delivered on his promise of a 50th Annual Members Exhibit containing “untold interior worlds, imaginings of the mind’s eye, ambition, desire, failure, redemption and fulfillment.”

When you bring your own eye to the exhibition, you’re sure to invent and discover many more.

Colin Dabkowski is a former Buffalo News arts critic and an English teacher.