Baltimore Woods exhibit features

Skaneateles Lake and the surrounding region have inspired both artists in their creative process, and the show reflects each artist’s interpretation. The exhibit includes drawings and paintings in oil, acrylic, pastel and watercolor and is open to the public with no admission or parking fee.Harms describes her work as becoming more organic in nature since moving away from cities to a rural area, and her artwork leans toward the abstract.

“The mood and nature of Skaneateles Lake, whether driving by, walking by or swimming in, is reflected in my recent drawings and paintings,” Harms said. “I am influenced by place, by color, by light.  Not in a direct landscape sense but as memory and sense.” Delmonico’s work has a realistic quality, often depicting local landscapes. Much of her work has an impressionistic feel.

“Painting, for me, is an honor, a privilege, a struggle, and most often, pure joy," Delmonico said. "To attempt to capture a scene or the essence of nature and create something interesting and exciting with light, texture and color is what motivates and defines this ongoing journey for me."Harms earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Parsons School of Design in New York City and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Chelsea School of Art in London.

An English-born artist, Harms has exhibited throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, including London and New York City and recently in Syracuse, Aurora and Skaneateles. Delmonico received her Bachelor of Arts from Boston College, majoring in studio art and elementary education, and a Master of Science in elementary education from Syracuse University.

Delmonico has exhibited widely in central New York and nationally, in venues such as the Everson Museum, Cazenovia College Art Gallery, the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Museum and the Pastel Society of America’s Annual Exhibition.

But the erased workers seem stereotyped and taken advantage of as their identities are elided. Labor can be depersonalizing and demoralizing, but it isn't by default so. These images deny the workers any chance to take pride in their labor or to own it as a personal accomplishment. Like a few other pieces in the show, these worker images need some subsequent thought.

“Worker Skins” is comparable to the white-out works, but it’s the best piece in the show. Hakanson-Stacy cut coveralls into hand-sized human outlines and dragged them through cement. Then she pinned them to the wall in a tight cluster. The more heavily caked ones clump and curl, oil painting reproduction, expressing the physical toll of manual labor. The others give the feeling of staring back at you with a posture of exhausted witness. The overall shape of their cluster is ambiguous—it could be the continental United States or it could be nothing intentional at all.

For the piece “One Minute,” Hakanson-Stacy cites Bureau of Labor statistics to compare a minute’s earnings, represented in pennies, for the average CEO ($116.66) to those of a minimum-wage worker (12 cents). The CEO’s pennies overflow a large glass bowl to scatter on the floor around its pedestal. The minimum-wage worker’s pennies are barely visible at the bottom of the kind of glass ramekin that servers bring your ranch dressing in.

“One Minute” could have been put to better use in WRK, Inc. Rather than locating the pedestals against a wall in the last corner of the gallery that you visit, they could have been placed in the middle of the gallery so that walking the show would redistribute the fallen pennies throughout the whole space, unifying its message.

Instead, a poorly executed video work entitled "Success" dominates the show, taking the front half of the gallery and suffering almost total illegibility from sunlight during the daylight hours. You can’t escape the audio drone of William Penn Patrick—a John Birch Californian who ran for Governor against Ronald Reagan (and lost for being further to the right of the Gipper)—reading his essay "Happiness and Success through Principle." The monologue is perforated occasionally by the pop of a balloon, which is shown onscreen. Hakanson-Stacy very effectively conveys the boom-and-bust economic reality beneath Patrick’s theocratic rhetoric with “Success” but, at almost 30 minutes, the audio loop is too long and a television would have been a better choice than a large video projection screen. One could easily assume that the video was turned off, it’s so washed out by the sun.

More disappointing was "Dreams," an audio piece that you listen to with headphones while staring at red threads pinned to a wall that a fan blows upon. The recording sounds as if it was made in the same bar all on the same night. A succession of young, white-sounding twenty-something voices basically state that, if they could do anything, it would be to travel, drink, and eat, in that order. Unselfish aspirations rarely appear. These narrators fall heavily on the lazy, “I don’t wanna work” end of the labor struggle, and the recording is embarrassing for the unnamed people who lent it their voices.

Frankly, “Dreams” pissed me off. It’s tantamount to middle-class whining, turning an overeducated, underemployed and disenfranchised generation into slackers complaining that their entitlements aren’t being recognized. Meanwhile you can hear the bartenders and dishwashers clinking craft beer glasses in the background, earning their wages. This piece takes a tipsy swing at class struggle.

If this critique is harsh then it’s because Hakanson-Stacy is obviously sincere and passionate about the issues she’s concerned with in this show, namely that a corporate ideology has been so driven into us—governmentally, societally and personally—that we can hardly get outside of it enough to think and talk about it. Her expression embodies that position at the expense of her sincerity and passion at times.

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