Dates: August 4-September 9, 2012
Location: Kaaterskill Fine Arts, Route 23A, Main Street, Hunter, NY
Gallery Hours: Monday & Thursday 12-4pm, Friday & Saturday 10am-5pm, Sunday 10am-4pm, and by appointment (Closed Tuesday-Wednesday)
Information: 518 263 2060

Our world is wildly out of balance. We are invaded by dangerous insects. We are also invaders and destroyers ourselves. This series of oil paintings by Dave Channon clashes and mashes these two concepts in superimposed, surrealistic layers of meaning and perspective. Gorgeous yet devastating Emerald Ash Borers and Asian Longhorn Beetles occupy visual space alongside endangered Costa Rican frogs and bizarre chameleons. The aerial views of knotty highway cloverleaves and fracking waste pools underscore the colossal struggle between man and the natural world.

Channon's steel sculptures reflect the vital energy of creatures and people in a different way. Antique tools and scrap metal are rescued from the dump and recycled into three dimensional collages. These humorous, lopsided mechanical balancing acts remind you of an Alexander Calder circus. Each corroded fragment retains its original identity as it merges into a new whole. A scythe blade becomes the grim reaping spine of a Headless Horseman. A verdigris crusted copper tea kettle is now Popeye's head and sailor cap. Birds, dinosaurs and firemen emerge out of the waste stream of our disposable society.

The paintings make a sincere stab at sophistication, the sculptures display the stupid genius of Basquiat. Which do you prefer? Channon compares his welding sessions to a kid playing with erector sets. There is room for fun and hard work, each have their place. Ideally one can do both at the same time, although he tends to paint in the winter and weld in the summer.

"THEM" refers to a movie where radioactive giant ants colonize the storm drains of Los Angeles. Current flooding issues make us more conscious than ever of infrastructure, environment and our impact on climate change. Channon's paintings and sculptures project the simultaneous tragedy and confusion of the situation. His deep motivation is obvious, but the answer to the riddle is not. As Walt Kelly's Pogo once said. "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Dave Channon has been an active exhibiting painter and sculptor in the New York art scene since his first show in 1979 at Franklin Furnace, an alternative art space in SOHO. He was apprentice to Joseph Cornell in 1969 at the age of seventeen, and has collaborated with such greats as Red Grooms, Phillip Guston and Robert Indiana. His sculptures have been reviewed in The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Village Voice and New York magazine. Channon has exhibited in the New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, the Venice Biennale, Stone Barns, a Rockefeller Foundation estate in Westchester, and many well respected galleries. You can see his works at 49A, a sculpture park at the Galli Curci estate in Highmount. Channon is co-founder of the Shandaken Art Studio Tour.

CLICK HERE to read an article by Paul Smart about this exhibition!