5 Artists Showing at The Moviehouse

Nadine Robbins’ portraits are deeply saturated with color, each subject beautifully rendered and individual with details that are unexpected, lively and precise. Done in oil, her incredible technique allows her to achieve an almost photorealistic quality in her work. Take “She-Ra” in which the arch of the subject’s eyebrow is as beautifully detailed as the knitted, DIY quality of the crown that he wears. Robbins is part of the Moviehouse’s “Winter Showcase,” a group show that brings together a collection of artists whose main affiliation is that each works in the Hudson Valley. Yet the work, a wide variety of styles and mediums, comes together with an unforeseen cohesion, and whether before or after a movie, or on a visit for its own sake, the show makes for a worthwhile trip.

There is an intensity of color in the paintings of Rhinebeck-based Audrey Francis. Her background as an illustrator is suggested in the bright, graphic pops that appear across her paintings and collect together unexpected images in collage-like tableaus, as in “Hill and Hollow,” an assemblage of birds impressive enough for Audubon to admire. Collage is essential in Roxie Johnson’s work. The pieces here, inspired by the artist’s travels along the coast of Maine, use softer, more washed out colors, suggestive of the sea. There is a great deal of texture in Johnson’s mixed media work, and each piece in the show incorporates a woman’s glove in some way.

In the screening room, Robert Hite’s “Duckweed Palace,” and “Sister Sister” may require more than one examination to discern that the small, strange structures set into black and white landscapes have been crafted by the artist and brought outside to photograph. The juxtaposition gives both the landscape and the architectural sculptures an unexpected, fantastical quality. Elsewhere in the show, Hite’s large scale paintings have elements that suggest folk painting, but seem to come from the same world as his wondrous structures. Norm Magnusson’s series, “Decorating Nature,” gives natural objects a surreal, almost absurdist quality and couples the images with titles both witty and mundane. In “Some Maples Succumb” to “Stripetococcus,” a maple leaf, painted in bright, almost rainbow stripes, sits, otherwise unremarkably, on the ground in the middle of the frame. That Magnusson is credited as founder of the art movement “funism” does not come as a great surprise given the playful work he has in the show. 

“Winter Showcase” will be open through February 6, 2019, at The Moviehouse, 48 Main Street, Millerton, N.Y.For further information go to www.themoviehouse.net or email info@themoviehouse.net