Troy-based collage artist Niki Haynes's latest piece, Parts Per Million, invokes an automotive cloud with the hypnotic, swirling movement of a flock of starlings, called a murmuration.
Parts Per Million belongs to her "Culture Consumed" series, which is the culmination of a body of work spanning 15 years. Haynes aims for each piece to stand alone but ultimately resonate together to identify and acknowledge our collective consumption and all it entails, encouraging us to stand back and absorb the big picture, adjust, and reapproach.
It also makes a visual representation or "semantic code" for the scientific term of parts per million (PPM) used to measure contaminants in the environment, generally invisible to the eye and easily ignored. "Even though that '64 Chevy may not be on the road anymore, the molecules of its exhaust, tire particles, and deteriorating parts are still all around us, polluting our air, water, and ground," Haynes says.
The concept of the series began to form for Haynes in the spring of 2020 when fewer cars on the road resulted in noticeably cleaner air.
Using a completely analog process, Haynes gleans imagery from materials such as magazines, newspapers, and books. She organizes, files, and cuts out images with scissors or an X-Acto knife. To reach a final version, she uses a chromatic wheel to ease the eye into accepting an otherwise overwhelming amount of visual information.
"As I work, I subtract some images and add others whose qualities and dynamism are needed to achieve the murmurating effect and to make it 'sing'—the positive and negative spaces have become harmonic so this means the piece is finished," Haynes says.
"You have to work backwards, upside down, and inside out, which can feel like a dyslexic nightmare. All of the puzzle pieces need to return to their proper place for it to hum again," she adds.
Inspired by her mother, Ellen Haynes, and her Pratt Institute mates Nancy Grossman and Anita Siegel, whose prolific collage work was featured in the New York Times during the 1960s and '70s, Haynes also takes cues from Warhol's '60s Pop Art.
But it's the swirling hum of the murmuration concept that she finds herself returning to most. "I make work that deals with sometimes heavy subject matter. I hope to engage the viewer to see human behavior and culture in a light they hadn't considered before or may want to ignore," Haynes says. "I attempt to touch on the elusive and strive to create work that may be simultaneously delightful, potent, jarring, beautiful, intriguing, and hopefully relevant."
"If the work succeeds on any of those levels, I am happy, but if its appeal is as a pretty picture, or a hit of nostalgia, that's okay too. I'm confident the deeper meanings will still register somewhere in the viewer's psyche," Haynes says.
'Culture Consumed' examines endless American appetites
By Patrick Tine
The Times Union August 14, 2019
When Gore Vidal said the only uniquely American art form was the television commercial he meant it, as he meant most things, as an insult. He was also not necessarily wrong. Some of the most popular American
visual artists have recognized that there is more than a measure of truth to that observation and have appropriated the iconography churned out by the admen for their own arch and transgressive purposes. To a school of artists that includes Andy Warhol, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine we can add Troy's own Niki Haynes, whose show "Culture Consumed" has been extended until October at the Arts Center of the Capital Region.
"Culture Consumed" is a collection of 32 collages and three video pieces made up of the instantly recognizable products found at Sunoco, Walmart, Rite-Aid, Tiffany & Co, car dealerships, liquor stores and the
pages of Guns & Ammo. In other words, her subject is America. Her cut paper collages, almost all of which are jewel boxes of detail, show this country at its most drunkenly rapacious and prone to violence.
The far wall of the well-used gallery space at the Arts Center is given over to a series of images of things that will kill you at varying rates of speed: cigarettes, liquor and guns. Haynes layers each collage like she is arranging flowers and three improbable bouquets emerge: "Drunk," "Smoked," and "Fired." There is a fourth, larger image that synthesizes the triptych. In "Target Audience" the booze, smokes and guns are rearranged
to form a bull's-eye. It is a bit too on the nose and Haynes can occasionally be needlessly direct in making her points but there it is.
The journey continues through American brand names and the stories they can unwittingly tell with "N.Y.C.," a recreation of Gotham and a sliver of New Jersey from roughly the same perspective as the famous New Yorker cover "New Yorkistan." Haynes imagines the city made out of advertisements from the 1930s through the 1960s. It's daring to make a collage like this because such an idea can easily trespass into waiting room schlock. But Haynes succeeds. Though replacing the Statue of Liberty with a syringe or having the Williamsburg Bridge emerge from a tube of Williams Luxury Shaving Cream may, again, be a bit too obvious, as a whole it absolutely works. Haynes turns the city into a Faberge egg of old fashioned Madison Avenue razzmatazz.
It is readily apparent—it's even mentioned in the show notes—that Haynes has a keen appreciation for old advertisements and general printed ephemera. In addition to an obvious aesthetic point of view, Haynes also brings an archivist's sensibility to her work that allows it function on several levels. The inherent critique of a consumer society that you'd expect from a show called "Culture Consumed" is excellent and would certainly please the Adbusters crowd and the ghost of Vidal. But it also can appeal to devotees of graphic design, who unironically see advertising as a legitimate art form. There's a reason why Taschen can charge $50 for a book on the Golden Age of Advertising. It speaks to Haynes' skill that she can appeal to both of these constituencies (to say nothing of the general public), without undercutting her message or archival enthusiasm.
Haynes walks this tightrope most ably in the show's two best pieces. There is "Sugarcoated," a lively, even jaunty, scene of all the various things we put in our body that conspire to kill us. A particularly turgid Joe Camel performs ministrations on that staple which lives in our politics, our food, our cars and our blood: corn. Another, smaller Joe Camel dressed in the garb of a Founding Father peeks out of a corner. "Sugarcoated" is the kind of work that, if it hung in your home, you'd find something new every time you looked at it. It's a biting piece of satire that is made all the better because Haynes resists the temptation to state the obvious.
The exhibit's focal point — "Consumption" — a 60-by-60-inch large format collage is a showstopper in the truest sense. What at first appears to be a color wheel riff on an I Spy picture book tableau slowly transforms into something more sinister. It builds to a crescendo of menace as you begin to count the number of guns pointed at you in this carnival of luxury items and consumer goods. It's a threatening, intoxicating image that refuses to relinquish your attention. It is, in its own way, an All-American image and Niki Haynes' America is a lot like our America: irresistible and indefensible.
Patrick Tine is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.
2020 Exhibition by Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region
The juror for the 2020 Regional is Susan Cross, Senior Curator at Mass MoCA
JUROR’S ESSAY
While so many museums across the U.S. remain closed and exhibitions are cancelled or indefinitely postponed as the country tries to contain the coronavirus, the Albany Institute's presentation of the beloved Mohawk-Hudson Regional Exhibition is particularly meaningful. This unwavering commitment to contemporary art and the artists of our region even in this precarious time, recognizes their importance if not necessity. Our community is fortunate to reopen many cultural institutions and celebrate the artists who, along with the area’s well-known natural beauty, make it an exhilarating, intellectually stimulating place for both those who live here and those who visit. After many isolatingmonths, distanced not only from each other but from the institutions, artists, and art that help sustain many of us, we feel more acutely what they bring to our lives. Of course, art can play many different roles. It can provide solace, or spark awe; it can tap into the beauty and mysteries of life both the order and the chaos; it can express unutterable emotion, it can offer escape, or act like a dream to understand waking life. Art can inspire, provoke, or critique. It can serve as our conscience or voice calling for change. It reveals new ways of seeing a lens through which to understand history or the present; it can engender new modes of thinking and being; it can help us process the world around us, or it can imagine another. Together, the works in this year’s exhibition of the artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region do all of this and more. My selection reflects the plurality of the arts in the region. This small cross-section of the expansive community of makers who call these mountains and valleys home includes artists of all ages and stages of their careers from prominent artists who maintain a national profile to others just starting out. It includes favorites whose work we look forward to seeing nearly every year and many newcomers as well. These choices and the exhibition embrace a range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, printmaking, drawing, watercolor, ceramic, and many textile works. Needlepoint, quilting, tapestry, embroidery, and rug-hooking are well represented; the innovation of these works and that of the history of textile and other previously overlooked craft-based practices feed a fertile cross- disciplinary dialogue. Presented in proximity, this profusion of disparate materials, methods, and styles exuberantly display the myriad ways artists try to communicate, connect, understand themselves and others, and express the ineffable, and sometimes the urgent.
The exhibition’s subject matter is equally diverse. Not surprisingly, the landscape figures prominently, both given the area’s natural scenery and the environmental crisis threatening the entire globe. Mike Glier’s magical paintings (opposite page), capture not just his observations of spring’s arrival and swallows hunting, but also, in his words, “the joy of living in the world and the wonder of perceiving it,” along with an underlying mission to protect the landscape that inspires him and many others. The lingering legacy of the Hudson River School is seen and felt in breathtaking canvases by Jane Bloodgood-Abrams and Katarina Holbrook-Spitzer (page 15) and in a humorous, but poignant homage by Jeff Wigman (page 47). Richard Barlow (pages 16 & 17) takes on the historic landscape in a large wall drawing in chalk, his choice of such an ephemeral medium and his nod to Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire might be warning us not just about society’s decline, but nature’s destruction as well. Kingsley Parker (pages 2 & 3) also addresses the ongoing threats to the environment with an image of the devastating effects of logging in the sculpture Harvest, while Jamie Rodríguez (page 43) reveals many of the complex sociopolitical histories embedded in the landscape. A critique of the commodity culture which has a big carbon footprint and profound impact on the environment is suggested in Niki Hayne’s large work Consumption (page 7). The collage overwhelms with a vivid explosion of the stuff that we produce and consume.
Kathy Greenwood’s reimagined rag rug sculpture (page 14) suggests a related message, spelled out in its title, Waste Not. The work brings to mind leaner, less materialistic times (this traditional rug made a resurgence in the Depression) when everything was put to some use. Transforming this utilitarian object into an abstract sculpture complicates our expectations of both and asks a question about thefunction of abstraction and its presence in our daily lives. Deborah Zlotzky’s assemblage of vintage scarves (page 21) seems to pose similar questions. Functioning like an abstract painting, the work’s geometric designs speak to us like one of the artist’s canvases, though there are additional layers of meaning from the body, to clothes and identity, and the stories of the scarves’ previous owners. Yet, line, shape, color, and composition are powerful on their own. The large selection of abstract works in the exhibition are a testament to their gravitational pull, their ability to move us and to speak on many emotional frequencies from the mysterious ancient solemnity of Greg Slick’s The Lives of Others (page 22) to the playfulness and unbridled energy of Jane Ehrlich’s intimate “automatic expressions.” All of the abstract works in the exhibition seem to evoke some intangible life force or invisible structure veiled beneath reality as we know it or engage both the challenge and the potential freedom in creating a new universe with its own set of internal rules.
While many of the artists engage the metaphysical realm, several respond directly to the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. Both continue to preoccupy us as we look for solutions to the virusand the ingrained systems of inequity and racism that it laid bare. Cyndy Barbone’s hand-woven portraits of masked women honor dedicated caregivers (page 25). Their ghost-like appearance (theartist avoids dyeing her linen to make her practice more sustainable) seems to emphasize how healthcare workers, working mothers, and other vulnerable communities often fade out of view. In Amy Silberkleit’s lithograph 1918 (page 24), a woman peeks out at us with just one eye visible between her face-covering and a stylish hat.
Sadly, we have not learned many lessons from last century’s deadly pandemic that infected a third of the world’s population. Silberkleit’s image of a wasp’s nest titled Shelter in Place (page 45) recalls the individual sacrifices social animals make for the strength of their community. The power of both individual responsibility and the collective also manifest in Meredith Best’s large, boisterous paintingProtesters (pages 4 & 5). Painted on comic books, her wide-eyed cartoon-like citizen activists resemble and mingle with Best’s graphic novel heroine Solar Power Girl, hoisting a sign that reminds us “thefuture is in our hands.” To shape that better future, we must face the past and its painfullegacies, and many of the artists do. Michael Oatman’s mural Imitation of Life, or, The Fossil Record (pages 18 & 19) papers themuseum wall in a grid of historical magazine clippings. Titled after LIFE magazine, which provided more than half the images, the work is also named for the 1959 film Imitation of Life, which addresses the racism, misogyny, and class distinctions found in the printed images and accompanying captions. Sadly, many of these attitudes exist today. Historical and cultural preservation and their intersection with memory—is examined in Debra Priestly’s ongoing series “preserves.” The works on view, each titled Strange Fruit, like the Billie Holiday song protesting the lynching of Black Americans, use the image of the canning jar to explore how cultural preservation can pass on entrenched attitudes and systems of oppression as well as provide strength and resistance for those whose histories are not told. Here Priestly has “preserved” the sheet music for “Amazing Grace” (right), which President Obama movingly sang at the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, killed by a white supremacist at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Song lyrics also figure prominently in Colin Chase’s reimagined American flag with stripes formed by the words of “None of Us Are Free” (page 27whose chorus entreats “none of us are free, none of us are free, if one of us is chained.” First written in 1993, the lyrics of the song a call for solidarity across time and cultures makes for an apt anthem for the current movement against racism which asks everyone to speak up“. . . if you don’t say it’s wrong, then that says it’s right . . .” Perhaps now more than ever, as many of us strive often alone or at a distance to leverage solidarity into change, art provides a criticalpoint of connection and reflection. The exhibition and the featured works provide a snapshot of this moment for the region, for the country but also speak to the eternal, universal struggles and joys that we each experience and long to share.
Post Gazette Review On Exhibit:
At the airport, sun scenes reflect our year of disorientation
By Indiana Nash | May 26, 2021
The latest exhibit to open at the Albany International Airport reflects the collective disorientation we’ve all experienced when it came to time this year. Mixing mediums, “Sunrise Sunset” offers picturesque views and contemplative works that echo the transience of our days. “I had been thinking for quite a long time over the months of COVID about how we’re experiencing time and how for many of us I think it was hard to tell if we were beginning the day or ending it,” said Kathy Greenwood, the director of the Art and Culture Program, who curated the exhibition.
It’s divided up into two sections, which is a first for Greenwood. One section is on the third-floor gallery, which has been restructured in recent months so that the gallery space is centered around the observation area rather than near the offices. All visitors are welcome and they don’t need to go through security first. The second section of the exhibit is in the post-security Concourse A Gallery. There is an online catalog of each work, accessible by a QR code on the exhibit panels. “It was important to me that people who are not traveling be able to see both sides of the exhibition. This is the first time I’ve tried to split one show between two locations so I was very mindful of trying to give people access to the whole picture,” Greenwood said.
Coming up to the third floor, one is greeted by three vibrant paintings from Carl Grauer. In “Backyard Sunset” the sky is glowing with orange creamsicle-colored clouds, as seen from the shade of a fenced-in yard.
Further along are several rural sunset scenes from Robert Moylan. Each gouache painting is a panoramic view of a snow-covered field, with mountains or a home in the distant background. The style is reminiscent of the Hudson River School, which seems fitting for the exhibition.
One of the more charming works in the exhibit is “Canning the Sunset,” by Carly Glovinski, who took the traditional colored sand crafts idea to a new level. Dozens of glass jars lined up along several shelves feature convincing compositions of sunsets, created using only hand-colored sand. Each jar is a different size and each sunset was created based on a different photo, some from Glovinski, some from friends. They’re all an attempt to preserve moments in time and memories, an overwhelming task considering time’s perpetual motion.
Across the gallery space is a stunning and disorienting digital print from Ghost of a Dream, a Hudson Valley-based couple. The work, titled “Aligned by the Sun (DACA),” overlays and combines photos of sunsets from each country where there are more than 1,000 DACA recipients are from, along with one sunset from the United States. “In a time of travel bans, persecution, climate change and now a global pandemic, ‘Aligned by the Sun’ seeks to unify our fractured planet by bringing attention to the one thing we all have access to, the sun,” wrote Ghost of a Dream in a statement.
Not too far away is a group of three paintings that echo a sense of in-betweenness, not only between day and night but between seasons. Artist Julia Whitney Barnes gives viewers a look at three sunrises/sunsets through what looks like stained glass windows, inspired by the atrium of Brookfield Place’s Winter Garden in lower Manhattan. “These works were all made in 2020 when days and months started blending together,” wrote Barnes in a statement. “This space has special significance in that it was destroyed on September 11th but completely rebuilt by the following year. This kind of rebirth imbues the imagery with a sense of optimism in the face of adversity.”
Downstairs, in the post-security section of the exhibit, are a few cheeky works. One, titled “Watch #7” by Niki Haynes, is at once surreal and irreverent, revealing an image of a watch collaged with an eye inside of its face. The watchful watch is placed in the foreground of a landscape with a sunrise (or perhaps a sunset), featured above pockets of water, into which the watch is sinking. There is a series of “watch” pieces in the exhibit, and according to the artist, they’ve been in the works for about 20 years and quarantining during the pandemic finally presented the right time.
Tasha Depp offers up a playful mixed-media work called “Sun Riding Pizza.” Her canvas is a DiGiorno four-cheese frozen pizza box, on which she blends an image of a glowing sun rising over a mountainous landscape into the marketing copy and imagery of the pizza. The juxtaposition of the natural scene with the processed and preserved pizza (under which the marketing copy declares “Rising Crust”) draws attention to what the artist calls “the foibles of a civilization determined to bring about its own demise.”
Nearby, Chris Gonyea reflects on patterns in nature, both in forested landscapes and in the sky, using a lightly abstracted painting style. In one work, called “Sawkill Sunset,” hints of trees at the center of the composition reach up into the sky, which is covered with salmon-colored clouds. Dark, imposing evergreen trees line the sides of the composition, contrasting with the bright pastel colors at the heart of the work. The abstraction in his work leads viewers to reflect on the connections between each aspect of the landscape, from the trees to the sky to the ground; they all blend and bleed together.
Times Union Newspaper - Albany
Airport gallery's 'Sunrise' show imbued with hope
Patrick Tine - June 3, 2021
There is something melancholy and unconsummated about going to the airport and not getting on a plane to go somewhere, or not picking up somebody you love who has come a long way to see you. Previous trips to the Albany International Airport Gallery solely to see the artwork, no matter how good it was, were always tinged with this feeling. It’s no one’s fault — certainly not the curator’s — that I couldn’t help but daydream about connecting through Newark en route to Tokyo or getting on the direct Delta puddle-jumper to visit my grandmother in Detroit when I should have been more focused on the work on the wall. But little in life is more enticing than the departure board when you haven’t been away for a while.
Despite having been grounded for the better part of 15 months, there is not a trace of that feeling when visiting “Sunrise Sunset,” the gallery’s newest show, running until Aug. 30. With 72 pieces by 46 artists, it is the largest show ever staged at the gallery, and the work is broadly imbued with the same sense of hope that travelers appear to have as they return to the skies. The show also comes during a period of transition for the gallery. The Airport Authority made the decision to turn about half of the usable space in the pre-security part of the gallery into administrative offices, and “Sunrise Sunset” is the first show to appear in this new configuration.
Kathy Greenwood, the airport’s indefatigable program director for arts and culture, who hung about 80 percent of the show herself, is diplomatic when admitting the “complicated” nature of the new arrangement. Losing space and possibly some departmental pull in a bureaucratic shuffle is lamentable, but “Sunrise Sunset” does not suffer because of it. If anything the new setup in the “expansive panoramic” observation deck before security, and on more than 100 feet of wall space in Concourse A beyond it, works to the show’s and perhaps the entire program’s advantage. The observation deck is more than up to the task and does not feel remotely cluttered. It is an airy and dramatic space, and it’s a testament to Greenwood’s deft hand and keen curatorial eye that it works so well.
It was Greenwood who put out the call to artists, looking for work orbiting a theme of comings, goings and our wildly disrupted sense of time in a pandemic era that now seems, mercifully, in retreat. The work is as literal and representational as straight gouache and oil sunrises and sunsets, and it gets more daring than what you might expect from public art at a midsize airport.
Ghost of a Dream, the husband and wife collaboration of Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom, features with two composite images, “Aligned by the Sun (DACA)” and “Aligned by the Sun (Travel Ban).” Made up of overlaid sunsets from every country from which a Deferred Action on Childhood Arrival recipient was born and from every country on the Trump Administration’s travel ban list, the images are quiet yet compelling protests and not pieces one would imagine seeing at a venue that would seem to be institutionally opposed to any form of boat-rocking. It was at airports across the country that some of the earliest and most vociferous protests against the Trump Administration, specifically against the hastily announced ban on travel from six majority Muslim countries, erupted in January 2017.
Gina Occhiogrosso places physical demands on the viewer with “Rise,” an installation in the A Concourse. It’s a black box with a peephole that forces you to bend at the waist in order to look through it. I won’t spoil the surprise, but you might end up spending more time contemplating whether your COVID 15 was more like 25, and how much your posture has been demolished in the last year, than the work itself. It’s such a nondescript little box that passing travelers might think you’ve lost your mind as well.
A few feet away Matt Frieburghaus gives us a dreamy, glitched-out mountain scene from Iceland in a video installation called “Midnight Sun.” Frieburghaus speaks with the “audiovisual eloquence” that attends what The New Yorker is calling the “vibes revival.” It’s perhaps just what you need to calm the mind and spirit after finding out your flight to Myrtle Beach is delayed again.
On the same wall Niki Haynes gives us plenty to think about with her “Watch” collage series. The work invites reflections on the passage of time and our deeply distorted sense of it in the pandemic era. For many of us it will feel, to varying degrees, like March 2020 for the rest of our lives. Her clock-watching collages taken from old advertisements also force you to consider where you are. We’re still at the airport, where the surrender to surveillance, commerce and the caprices of ever-changing schedules is absolute.
Heather Hutchinson has fun with a teacup Rothko called “FIN,” Madison La Vallee’s “soft power: smog” rotates like a showroom Cadillac, and Carly Glovinski’s “Canning the Sunset” takes the children’s craft of sand art to new heights in a plum position on the central wall of the observation deck gallery. With this many pieces on offer, this litany could go on for some time. The show bursts with variety, but it is all largely oriented in a hopeful direction. It is what the present moment calls for if not demands, and it is one you are free to experience now that you can buy a ticket and go somewhere.
On Exhibit: American Girl illustrations find institute spotlight
Indiana Nash| December 28, 2017
Members’ Show at Albany Center Gallery
The Albany Center Gallery packs a lot in with its 2017 Members’ Show.
Works from more than 150 artists are on display, from sculptures to photorealistic paintings to photography and everything in between. It’s a feast for the eyes and one that requires a leisurely walk through the gallery space. The show is surprising in scale, featuring large works and miniatures such as Stephanie Levay’s mixed-media piece called “The Sheriff” that fits into a container the size of an Altoids tin.
With a large show it can be difficult to come away with just a few standout pieces, but “Round Up” by Niki Haynes is one that stood out from the others. It’s a mixed-media collage in which products such as shaving cream and canned goods are given faces and anthropomorphic qualities. It’s a surreal piece that asks more questions than it answers.
“Opus 40,” is another eye-catching work, literally jutting out from the wall. Artist Sean Stewart created a windy sculpture of a winding path with intricate stonework and trees. It looks like the stones would be cool to the touch and the trees would actually blow in the wind, although Stewart used only paper and paint to create the work.
The President’s Choice Award went to Emily Dorr’s watercolor-and-ink piece “Preserved.” No wonder, as Dorr depicts an elk crying out as it’s becoming engulfed in an icy blue color.