'Landmines' and 'Movement' at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
Landmines through July 13, 2025, and Movement through April 6, 2025 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, N.Y.
Richard Mosse, Slaughterhouse Rondônia (2021), archival pigment print, in Landmines; Courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and The Dorsky Museum.
Landmines is an engaging exploration of radical displacement and upheavals in environmental and social evolution. Marking the bicentennial of the Hudson River School’s founding, the advent of landscape photography, and the forced resettlements of indigenous mid-Hudson Valley people to Wisconsin and elsewhere, the exhibition contains mostly photo-based works by artists Richard Mosse, Rick Silva, Christina Fernandez and Dawoud Bey. Organized by curator Sophie Landres, the exhibition is bookended by a vitrine containing an 1828 sketchbook by Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole, near the entrance, and closing the show, Provenance (2023), an installation by Erin Lee Antonak (Wolf Clan member of Oneida Nation), imparting a touching personal narrative centered on a hand-beaded moccasin.
Installation view, Landmines, Dorksy Museum, 2025.
In their understated way, Dawoud Bey’s eerie and heartbreaking black-and-white photos of abandoned plantations convey the trauma of slavery. Christina Fernandez’s installation of earthen mounds embedded with index cards pay homage to migrant farmworkers of Southern California. And Rick Silva’s video projection, with a series of mesmerizing split-screen dissolves, explores the geo-social impact mining and energy companies have on sacred Indigenous lands. With the effects of climate change everywhere in evidence today, and the current U.S. government policies to combat it now as endangered as the environment itself, Richard Mosse’s large and stunning recent photos deliver an urgent message. They expose the catastrophic local impact and global consequences of cattle farms and other agribusinesses that are systematically destroying the Amazon rainforest. From a distance, the unabashedly gorgeous photo works, such as Slaughterhouse Rondônia (2021) made with drone cameras, appear as sumptuous abstract paintings. Up close, the vivid details of deforestation harbor some harrowing implications.
Installation view, Movement, Dorksy Museum, 2025.
In some ways, Movement, through April 6, 2025, installed in galleries across the hall, continues and augments several of the core themes of Landmines: migration, political displacement, and social change among them. Organized by the artist ransome, the exhibition is an annual event to showcase contemporary artists of the Hudson Valley. Among the highlights, Joel Longenecker’s large, opulent painting Pitfalls and Promises (2024) from a distance recalls Mosse’s work in its optical seduction. On closer inspection, the now-discernable small plastic toy animals embedded in the dense impasto of earthy pigments help transform the composition into a statement about animal migration and the instability of their natural habitats. Similarly, Suprina’s 3-minute video gem, Ode to the Albatross (2023), at first appears as a Post-Pop film, with colorful plastic items like tooth brushes and cigarette lighters arranged in tidy rows on a table and shot from above. Scrolling text, however, reveals the appalling disclosure that these items are all sea junk found in the bellies of deceased Albatross chicks. And Fern Apel’s meticulously wrought painting Letters Home (2022) appears as a paper collage of stacked letters, from a traveler at sea near Buenos Aires and elsewhere, feeling alone and isolated. It is a compelling and highly estheticized expression of homesickness. —David Ebony