Joe Conra's Paintings and Landon Nordeman's Photographs Rock Van Brunt Gallery in June.
 
Beginning Saturday June 6th, the question at Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon will be: What is this thing called Rock and Roll? There are countless answers to this question of course, but two possible ones revolve around attitude and identity. There is a walk and a talk and a look that rock, communicating answers to that big question: "Who am I?" The response may be: a rebel, a wild child, a provocateur who fearlessly speaks truth to power or, in the case of artist Joe Concra, all of the above, as well as a painter of images that have the impact of a row of amps set to maximum volume.
 
Concra paints places and 'occurrences' that are both oddly familiar and more than slightly unsettling: a parallel universe where one's sense of 'order' and 'normalcy' have been uprooted, where mongrel beasts dressed in human garments participate in absurdist performances of light and dark.
 
In one such painting, "Gold Standard," a large monkey ominously claps as coins float and flip in the sky. In another, "Funny Bird," a turkey in a clown hat seems to shreik "What?" his feathers a bevy of exclamation points. There is definitely something happening here, but we don't know what it is, do we. Which is OK, as long as we can laugh and, as in Joe Concra's case, paint extremely well. And no doubt, Joe Concra knows how to move oil paint around on the surface of a canvas with a brush. He loves the process of creating space and light and matter, as well as the materiality of paint itself.
 
It is not well enough understood that artists are visual thinkers. There is no direct translation possible of a good painting into parts of speech. You either see it or you don't. Which doesn't mean that there's nothing to talk about. Just that talking has to wait.
Joe says that his paintings speak for themselves. It would be more accurate to say that they don't speak at all, they rock.
 
Which brings us to the fact that Elvis seems to have died and yet he lives on in his music and his image, lastingly imprinted on our collective psyche. So profound is his mark on our culture that many people feel the need to be Elvis or at least to impersonate him.
 
Landon Nordeman, who does photographs for major publications such as The New Yorker, has a knack for capturing compelling images of people, including those who would be King (of Rock and Roll). This month at Van Brunt Gallery, Nordeman is showing several prime examples of his Elvis impersonator photographs. These reveal a great deal about the stuff our dreams are made of and how those dreams sometimes fall short of the personal transformation so desired by those who embrace them.