Ben Ruggiero

The legacy of Hudson River School painter Frederic Church haunts Ben Ruggiero’s latest exhibition of experiments in photography. A picture in the entryway of this show depicts an orientation room at Olana, Church’s home on the Hudson. Plastic chairs are neatly lined up, facing a flat-screen TV that is placed in front of a pull-down projection screen. A defunct projector hangs from the ceiling. Paused on the TV is an image of Church’s majestic landscape painting The Icebergs, 1861, which was lost for over a century before being rediscovered in 1979. The technological apparatuses of projector, TV

picks April 03, 2010

Katy Horan

Katy Horan’s recent works on paper examine the gesture—arms flailing, or a head cocked to one side, or legs splayed in the air. Yet the figures depicted in “Lady Monsters” remain more oblique than their movements. Though these ladies are dressed in bustles and lace headdresses, to assume that they are polite would be erroneous. One might infer that the figures in pieces like Seer or Handmaidens (all works 2009), swallowed as they are in intricate lace patterns, are Victorian conjurers, Furies from a Greek vase, or other witchy characters. They seethe with a slight mystery and darkness that bring