The Noble Savage and The Tramp at Mount Tremper Arts

My husband and I surprised our weekend guests with a trek out to Mount Tremper Arts from Rosendale to see the show The Noble Savage and The Tramp, curated by Hannah Whitaker. More often than not, when guests come up from the city, they prefer to submerge themselves in nature, play and relax. Mount Tremper Arts is an exception though. It's situated up on a hill surrounded by trees and once you enter the exhibition space, you get the sense that you are surrounded by nature. We were all very glad to take our shoes off to enter the space to see the show. It is not a typical art experience and the show was thoughtful and quietly insistent.

I am often baffled when looking at photographs. I feel like many artists are often trying to trick me (the viewer) into thinking that I am not looking at an hyper-altered and photoshopped image. Each photograph in this show debunked my feeling. I found that each work engaged me to think about how a picture is constructed and how we approach an image. I liked how I had to circle the show a few times and slid across the room to verify what I saw was in fact what I saw. In her essay, Whitaker writes, "There's a modesty to the works of the artists that I find attractive, as if they are simply sidestepping the race to find the next great artist out of the devastation, in favor of more honest pursuits. They asymptomatically approach a basic core, where hard meaning can reliably be found, like a rock smoothed by friction." The works were playful and diligent in engaging the audience with focused imagery which Whitaker describes as "acts not of escapism, but of affirmation." At a time like ours, we need as much affirmation as possible and I appreciated Hannah Whitaker's sincere direction of the show.

At a first glance, I found the inclusion of non-photographic works, such as Caleb Considine's painting, "Reinforcements" and Nayland Blake's "Untitled" sculpture, a little odd. May be because photographic works way out numbered the other mediums in the show. Even some works like Michaela Fruwirth's "Untitled" drawing and Anya Kielar's sprayogram, "Native Walker", made you question the medium and the trace of the artist's hands were not visible. It was not that these non-photographic works seemed secondary to photographs. It seemed more like the curator was asking us to look at these works in relation to photographs. I'm not quite certain yet what this means to me but I feel like it's worth mentioning here. Maybe because unlike any other medium, photography is the most readily used in daily life whether you're an artist or not, to catalogue art, capture our loved ones, document accidents and happenings to name a few instances.

Thank you Hannah and Mount Tremper Arts for a wonderful experience!

By Heige Kim from Roos Arts
www.roosarts.com