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HOME ON THE RANGE: WORKS BY ANNOEL KRIDER AND TED WADDELL
511 Gallery Lake Placid, at 2461 Main Street, is pleased to present its new exhibition, Home on the Range, from May 22 to June 22, with an opening reception on May 22, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Fiber artist Annoel Krider's wall-mounted figurative works are made from sticks, paper, beeswax, pine resin, yarn, and beads. Inspired by southwestern landscape and indigenous peoples' myths and narratives, these figures seem like strangely human presences, with pieces of twigs or fabric "standing for" legs, arms, even an imagined head in some cases. Within the body of the figures are geometric-shaped sections of woven wool, paper, and other materials. Mounted on the wall, these presences become totemic symbols, referencing the landscape of the southwest as seen through the prism of its indigenous inhabitants. Annoel Krider lives and makes work in Wilmington, New York.
Ted Waddell is a well-known painter, who also is a sculptor and drawing artist. His subject matter also is the Western landscape, but in Waddell's works the figures are animals - horses most of all, but also cattle, sheep, and dogs. His exhibition at 511 will be paintings, drawings, and sculptures of guns, made from materials such as snakeskin, bones, semiprecious stones, and wood. The guns, plus a papier mache cow's head incorporating part of the cow's actual skull, point up the irony possible when contemporary Western artists explore the subject matter that is synonymous with the American West: landscape, ranching, hunting, and shooting. Waddell's artworks are in the collections of many U.S. museums, as well as corporate and private collections.
Annoel Krider and Ted Waddell share a similar engagement with issues involving the natural landscape that is the West. But where Krider's work shows a gentleness bordering on reverence for the past, Waddell's is decidedly ironic and enigmatic.
