by Zach Hunley & Emma Riva / Photo by Sean Carroll
Photo: (pedestal), Jonathan Lohr (wall right), Tammy Skiver Maxson (floor right). Courtesy of the artists.
On the evening of October 10th, Emma Riva and I both attended the opening of Adaptation – Local Notes, a group exhibition of Allegheny Country artists at the Tomayko Foundation, on view through November 22. We wanted to share some local notes of our own resulting from our time with the work. Enjoy! – Zach Hunley
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ER: I really was drawn towards the brightness of Loring Taoka’s work. It was fun to see such a wide-ranging group exhibition with both hanging works and standing pieces in the center of the space, since many shows I’ve seen recently have been solo shows. There seems to be a bit of a trend locally towards the relationship to landscape–ZYNKA Gallery’s This Land is. . . plus the Carnegie Museum’s Widening the Lens, and now this focus on the dichotomy between manmade and natural.
I will be keeping an eye out at fairs and on social media to see if this is something going on in the wider market, but I wonder if it’s a response to how disconnected we feel from nature, as earlier trends towards domestic interiors felt like a response to a need for coziness/hominess during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anyways! This was a very strong show with some heavy hitters.
Melissa Catanese’s small photo works were haunting and beautiful–she has a way of focusing in on individual details that really shows her skills. Also, Sean P. Morrissey’s piece, where you could take away a small risograph, was definitely a highlight.
ZH: Your observation RE: artists trending towards examining our relationship to landscape feels accurate and is a great note. It made me think about the notion of the “man-made landscape,” or the idea that we as humans create the land we see. I have kept this article from 2007 by Dianne Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles with me since reading it in grad school; there are so many bangers in it, but their idea that “The landscape is [produced] by physical and cultural conditions and exists on such a large scale that it can rarely be known or discerned through a single, simple glance but is instead perceived by an accumulation of observations in which not only optics but also memory come into play… ‘landscape is a way of seeing’,” feels most applicable here.
Sorry for going on a theory tangent, but I found it interesting how this show specifically focuses on the ways we have adapted to or interacted with and had an impact on the local landscapes, both urban and “natural” alike – an intriguing premise that provides a lot to work with.
We see this conception of the “local notes” appear explicitly or thematically across the work – from the PRT bus cameo in Anisha Baid’s video installation, to repeated appearances of the spotted lantern fly, as in Catanese’s striking and intimate photos and Finn Dugan’s fleshy and industrial wall-mounted sculpture (I loved the use of a TV mount as hardware for hanging in this piece, I just thought that was neat).
The relatively small space is extremely well utilized given that the show consists of work by 13 artists; it made for a very cozy opening on this cool, early fall evening. The show features multimedia photography, sculpture, and paintings – it’s all relatively small sized work. As a result, they each felt intimate in their own way, with lots of small details that reward close looking. I found myself lingering on Karen Antonelli’s black and white image Long Division V (2019-2022) – a striking composition that highlights the medium’s subjectivity. Barbara Weissberger’s studio portraits of assembled quotidian objects (my fav being a potato impaled with zebra striped birthday candles) occupy a wonderful space between surreal and absurd; something I felt was shared with the piece sat opposite, across the gallery, a small vitrine by Adrienne Borkowski. I echo your praise for Sean Morrissey’s brick piece (what’s better than art you can touch and take with you?) and Loring Taoka’s paintings – exceptionally vibrant energy!
ER: I also got the sense that the Tomayko Foundation is coming into its own as an exhibition space in its first year of programming. It was great to see work by La Vispera that the gallery had acquired from the previous show on the opening façade when you walked in. That showed the space’s investment in the arts right when you walk in the door!
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Adaptation – Local Notes is on view at the Tomayko Foundation through November 22, 2024. Gallery hours are M-F, 11am-4pm, weekends by appointment. To learn more, visit tomayko.foundation. Participating artists include Adrienne Borkowski, Anisha Baid, April Friges, Barbara Weissberger, Elizabeth Scutt, Finn Dugan, Jonathan Lohr, Karen Antonelli, Loring Taoka, Manami Ishimura, Melissa Catanese, Sean P. Morrissey, and Tammy Skiver Maxson. The exhibition is juried by Michaela Blanc and organized by Nina Friedman,.
PETRICHOR 
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