2014 MOHAWK HUDSON REGIONAL INVITATIONAL

ALBANY CENTER GALLERY PRESENTS THE WORK OF THREE INSPIRING LOCAL ARTISTS AT ITS ANNUAL MOHAWK HUDSON REGIONAL INVITATIONAL

From February 4 – March 1, 2014, Albany Center Gallery will present the 2014 Mohawk Hudson Regional Invitational, which features the work of acclaimed regional artists Mary Anne Erickson, Scott Nelson Foster, and Michael McKay.

For more information on the show, visit the Times Union website: Matters of Interpretation

Each year, Albany Center Gallery highlights selected artists from the previous year’s Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region exhibit, a rotating juried exhibition that is always one of the area’s most prestigious and popular shows. This year, ACG Executive Director Tony Iadicicco selected Mary Anne Erickson, Scott Nelson Foster, and Michael McKay from more than 70 artists included in the 2013 Artists of the Mohawk Region show at the Hyde Collection Art Museum and Historic House in Glens Falls.

The gallery is thrilled to provide these three accomplished and stimulating artists with an opportunity to showcase their work in greater depth.

Mary Anne Erickson draws her inspiration from her childhood experience of American roadside culture while taking “drive vacations” with her father - exposing her to small-town scenes across the United States. Carrying this theme throughout her works, Erickson focuses on the single details and individualistic aspects of road trip adventures. Lamenting the loss of this 1950s culture with the decline of local and differentiated “mom and pop” motels, restaurants, and diners and the rise of modern hotel chains and strip malls, which left the relics of the past as abandoned icons, Erickson seeks to capture the disappearance of these cultural symbols and immortalize the ones that remain. In exploring the concept of “vanishing America”, Erickson preserves a cultural past while creating images that are both nostalgic and thought-provoking.

Growing up in Boise, Idaho, Scott Nelson Foster first learned to draw and paint from his uncle, Roland Giampaoli, and his grandfather, Will Nelson, who helped him to develop a variety of expressive and tightly controlled watercolor techniques. After graduating Northwest Nazarene University, Foster continued his studies at Utah State University, where he experimented with painting methods from the medieval and renaissance eras. After earning his MFA, Foster joined the USU faculty as a lecturer and, in 2010, moved to upstate New York, where he took a position as assistant professor of studio art at Siena College. Many of his works feature outdoor scenes from everyday small-town America, inspired by his time in the western United States. Foster uses a variety of different painting techniques and experimental colors that express a unique perspective and evoke a certain curiosity. Drawing his inspiration from outdated, cold war era, American advertising and textbook illustration styles that signify the hollow fiction of the American dream, Foster’s images, as quoted by the artist, “seduce with nostalgia while simultaneously embodying an underlying sense of dread”.

A native of southeastern Massachusetts, Michael McKay went on to study printmaking, painting, sound, film, and performance art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. As an independent producer, McKay organized performance and multi-media shows at various venues across the Boston area, including the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, Harvard Film Archives, Mobius Performance Gallery and for the Eventworks Arts Festival. In 200, along with his wife, artist Monika Pizzichemi, he co-founded the Empty Set Project Space, which served as a forum for local artists during the early years of Pittsfield’s cultural rebirth, and now operates as a gallery and art studio. McKay uses a variety of unique and sometimes unconventional techniques and colors to create haunting yet intriguingly alluring pieces that convey scenes from a different, melancholy perspective on American culture.

An opening reception for the 2014 Mohawk Hudson Regional Invitational will be held from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Friday, February 7th. The public is invited to attend.