Roberta Bolt's Fog Light

Industrial Art

Art about industry and art about nature emerge as sub-topics among the potpourri of works on show in the Buffalo Society of Artists catalog exhibit at Hi-Temp Fabrication.

Two works by two artists displayed side by side are impressive aesthetically and delve into the legacy in the present of a previous industrial age. Doreen Cutting’s mixed media collage of stark black and white photo and problematizing slash of crimson paint shows remnant infrastructure of a former steel plant behind a chain-link fence probably originally erected to keep public off private industrial property, but that now serves to keep public off contaminated land, as a cheaper alternative to environmental remediation of the property to return it to public use.

Adjacent to Cutting’s work is Sara Zak’s smudge painterly technique “and it is a thread that winds, seldom dominant,” a work that beyond the slightly mysterious title, slightly mysterious imagery, seems to refer to industrial heritage as work environment and subtly feminist issue. A ghostly obscured depiction of a textile factory—historical prototype of the factory system—evoking child labor and female labor social and political issues (underscored in that textile work—spinning, sewing, weaving—was female province—distaff work—traditionally forever). So the idea of female craft work versus male industrial system. Another subtle feminist element is the social connectivity faint webline of thread or yarn product running from pulley to pulley around and above the factory space. But the work is first and foremost a painting, not a manifesto. Another similar technique work by the same artist is of industrial apparatus in a factory setting more or less simply stated, without the sociopolitical overtones. It is called to jump across a precipice. (Zak eschews capitals.)

Gene Witkowski has two superb lake freighters and elevators photos featuring sharp contrasts of conveyer apparatus oblique lines and elevator verticals in deep rust reds amid dawn lights and shadows. Rust red and sunlight and shadows also in Catherine Linder Spencer’s bird’s eye perspective photo of an elevator complex and crowded foreground corrugated-metal-clad ancillary structures, not aging nearly so well as the concrete silos behind them. Elevator alley as dense cityscape. Whereas Rita Argen Auerbach’s grain elevators watercolor presents the ponderous concrete structures as almost ethereal amid the spectrum play of pale greens and blues and yellows.

Among the nature works are two lovely creek scene watercolors by Margaret Haug-Chlebowski, a winter view of woods and water by George Grace, a pair of swamp waters and rushes scenes by Linda Toomey, and Kathleen McDonnell’s misty morning scrub brush and trees on desolate heath impressionist works in pastel.

Other notable impressionist technique works include Roberta Bolt’s two noir watercolors Fog Light and A Dark Night on Allen Street.

Among other notable works, Len Kagelmacher’s remake of Italian Renaissance master Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana. Kagelmacher’s version is called Crashing the Wedding at Cana. Veronese was notorious for introducing an unusual number and variety of human subjects into traditional format and content religious paintings, to the annoyance of ecclesiastical authorities. Kagelmacher ups the ante, introducing a crowd of current-day people into the wedding banquet scene. (Where they may run out of eats, but no worry about enough wine to go around.)

And an unusual pose portrait photo by James Sedwick—the subject in right profile, at the far left side of the canvas, so looking off left, out of the frame of the picture, and behind him an abstract painting with large letters UZ—entitled UZ: Bob Herrmann (Professor of Geophysics, St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri? Who has written about how surface wave spectral amplitudes may relate to point sources with step source line functions? UZ being the vertical component Rayleigh wave spectral amplitude, where UT is the transverse component Love wave spectral amplitude?)

The BSA exhibit remains on view through October 4.