Unflinching Body Image at Troy, Albany galleries

by Timothy Cahill
Staff writer, Times Union

The group show Body Image is so big it needs two galleries to contain it. The show, opening Wednesday, features paintings, drawings, photographs and sculpture all about the human body and figure-based imagery.

The Fulton Street Gallery in Troy and the Rathbone Gallery on the Sage Campus in Albany will co-host the 56 works by 32 artists from Europe and the United States.

When it comes to art concerning the body these days, some topics may be considered controversial — from nudity and sex to politics and religion. So in deciding which works would appear in which gallery, Fulton Street director Colleen Skiff and her counterpart, Rathbone’s Jim Richard Wilson, took content and potential controversy into consideration.

“We decided the work that might be perceived as edgy or more troublesome would be at Rathbone,” explained Wilson. “Fulton Street is on a street with other businesses, while Rathbone is on a campus. Visitors and other pedestrians would be less likely to come into (Rathbone) by surprise and be taken aback by something they weren't expecting.”

Those attending either venue should expect art that, at minimum, is unflinching. Skiff, whose brainchild Body Image is, said her show may be provocative, but considers that one of its virtues.

Psychological, spiritual, political, health issues, social dynamics — it’s a real overview,” she said. “Every work makes you think about the body in a new way.”

Body Image was juried by Troy resident Ken Johnson, a New York Times critic and art professor at the University at Albany. Johnson began with some 1,200 slide submissions, culling them down to what he describes as a “kaleidoscopic show.”

“Rather than an emblem of balance and harmony,” Johnson writes of figurative art in his juror’s statement, “it’s become a site of conflict and chaos, a symbol of the upheaval and confusion that makes late 20th-century life so interesting and scary.”

Skiff debuted a similar exhibition of figure-based art last summer at Rathbone. This year she expanded the scope of the show, adding her fledgling Fulton Street Gallery, which opened last September, as an exhibit site.

“We're doing this (figurative show) because it's not being done, and there's a need for it. This work is being underseen.”

In conjunction with the exhibit, a series of workshops and lectures will be held on the Sage Albany Campus from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. next Saturday. Offerings include figure-drawing classes and lectures like “Bimbos & Goddesses” and “The Body as Personal Icon.” The forum, said Skiff, is designed to "address questions that may not be answered just by looking at visual images.”

Body Image will have two public openings, from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Fulton Street Gallery, 408 Fulton St., Troy, and Saturday at Rathbone Gallery, 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany. It remains on view through June 20. For more information or to register for the Saturday forum, call 274-8464.

Facts:

Article from the Times Union (Sunday, May 10, 1998

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