Teaching Gallery Opens the Semester with Exhibition of Sculpture and Installation by Peter Dudek and Susan Meyer
September 6, 2019
The Teaching Gallery at Hudson Valley Community College announces Collage City, an exhibition of sculpture and installation by New York-based artists Peter Dudek and Susan Meyer. Following an opening reception with the artists from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 19, the exhibit will be on view through Oct. 26 in The Teaching Gallery, located on the ground floor of the Administration Building on the Troy campus.
Artist talks will be on Thursday, Sept. 19 with Dudek and Wednesday, Oct. 16 with Meyer. Both talks are from 3 to 4 p.m. in the Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium. All events, including the reception, are free and open to the public.
Both Susan Meyer and Peter Dudek explore the dream and fragmentary remains of utopian societies in their work. The exhibit title references the 1984 book in which architects and frequent co-authors Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter critique post-WWII urban design, rejecting the concept of “total planning” in favor of a “collage city” made up of an assortment of smaller, neighborhood utopias. Likewise, Dudek and Meyer use modernist and utopian concepts of architecture and community organization as a basis to explore contemporary culture and the built environment.
Dudek will exhibit selections from several bodies of work, as well as other “sculptural experiments.” In his recent White-Out pieces, Dudek paints on photographs of his installations and studio views in an almost “anti-collage” manner that, according to the artist, “edits out details in search of other resolutions and ambiguity [where] elements and distances become uncertain… echoing the indefinite nature of art-making and the predicament of forever being in search mode when in the studio.” Suspended from the gallery ceiling, Dudek’s Clouds contain bits and pieces of architectural forms and materials that he thinks of as “thought clouds, dreaming of life in a cumulus idyll.” Some of the clouds contain “building fragments, violently thrown above by tornadoes” and bring to mind “a floating salvage yard.”
Meyer’s work explores her ongoing interest in Drop City, a late 1960s Colorado commune. Its members built geodesic dome houses from reclaimed objects such as cut up car hoods, and earned a 1967 R. Buckminster Fuller “Dymaxion Award.” (In Fuller’s early career, the architect developed and promoted ways to build practical and efficient housing.) In her complex sculptures, Meyer combines intricate hand-built structures with digitally rendered images that pay homage to the geodesic domes of Fuller and Drop City. In both their construction and broad use of found materials and images, her pieces exemplify the “cut and combine” aesthetic of Drop City, as well as the creative freedom that life on the commune embodied. Like many other communities of its kind, Drop City was abandoned by the early 1970s, but its dream of communal survival and self-governance resonates to this day.
Peter Dudek holds a MA degree from Hunter College and a BFA degree from the School for Visual Arts, both in New York City. He is the Director of Cultural Programming for Bascom Lodge in Adams, MA, and teaches sculpture at Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts. Recent exhibitions include I Forgot, BravinLee Programs, NYC; Polymorphous, Cluster Gallery, Brooklyn; Space, Light and Disorder, Markel Fine Arts, NYC, and Object’hood, Lesley Heller Workspace, NYC. He lives in Yonkers and Windsor, MA.
Susan Meyer, associate professor in the Center for Art and Design at the College of Saint Rose, holds a MFA degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, MA, and a BS degree from Skidmore College. Recent exhibits include Earthly Delights, The Re Institute, Millerton, NY; Ear to the Ground, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; Contemporary Sculpture: Off the Wall, Floor and Ceiling, Site: Brooklyn Gallery, Brooklyn, and the Mohawk Hudson Regional Invitational, Albany Center Gallery. She lives in Hudson.
Exhibitions in The Teaching Gallery are installed and assisted by students enrolled in Gallery Management courses and supported by the Department of Fine Arts, Theatre Arts and Digital Media, the Cultural Affairs Program and the Hudson Valley Community College Foundation. Associate Professor Tara Fracalossi is gallery director.
Hours in The Teaching Gallery
Tuesday, Thursday and Friday: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Wednesday: 1 to 7 p.m.
Saturday: noon to 4 p.m.
Sunday and Monday: closed
More Information
For more information, visit the Teaching Gallery webpage or call (518) 629-8006.