Collaborations and communication in Millerton’s arts scene: Mad Rose Gallery’s grand opening

MILLERTON —  Roughly 70 people showed up on Saturday, July 29, some in the midst of a raging rainstorm that left part of the village without power until mid-Sunday, to celebrate the opening of a show of the work of lifelong photographer Kerry Madigan, owner, with husband Neal Rosenthal, of Mad Rose Gallery.

This inaugural event, intended for the arts and business communities to keep numbers manageable in the airy but modest gallery, was one of many foreseen by its owners and managers in which the general public will play a bigger part.

A longtime Shekomeko resident who first discovered her passion for taking pictures at the age of 12 with a Polaroid camera, Madigan has, over the years, moved through the most sophisticated equipment, favoring large-format cameras, Nikons and Hasselblads. She made the switch to digital photography in 2022 and has not looked back, though she has kept her darkroom.

The 36 pieces in the show, culled from thousands of shots, are all fresh from this period of change, with the exception of one.

The accumulation of new work spurred Madigan’s wish to exhibit and a search for possible venues, and within less than two months, Rosenthal had found and set up the building that formerly housed Allee Architects, opposite the old Gilmor Glass building on the corner where routes 22 and 44 part ways, and Mad Rose Gallery was born.

“It will be an anchor,” said gallery manager Robert Flower, for lower Main Street, an invitation toward the village and, in the other direction, toward the new Eddie Collins park and playground.

As with any artist leaving the analog behind or incorporating digital with an existing practice, the learning curve is steep. Madigan has worked for about a year with curator Michael Lavin Flower—brother to Robert—to tease out all the possibilities in each shot.

Over this time, Flower said, the two of them have gone out shooting at “the ranch” or in the city, then sat at a computer screen weeding out “thousands and thousands” of images to find the best ones to perfect.

The first paragraph in Madigan’s process statement on the gallery website will incite nostalgia for former darkroom buffs with its succinct listing of moves and materials.  In an effort to set up a darkroom, for example, Madigan removed a bed in her long-ago apartment’s extra room to fit it out with the requisite surfaces and appurtenances for processing negatives and making enlargements, while honoring her cat’s need for a private space.

In Madigan’s diptych “Vespula Vulgaris”, the mysterious innards of a large, bag-like nest with its hexagonal structure is riddled with various detritus and bodies of the “common wasp,” as it is known, while its outside of corrugated-looking “paper”—chewed wood fibers and saliva—presents a completely different view that could be a landscape or a modernist building.

The left-handed side of the diptych is divided into two smaller and a larger rectangle variously cropped, while the right is one unitary image.

That same passion for detail and need to serve a vision are evident in the telling of Michael Lavin Flower’s tale of his collaboration with Madigan. He navigates the software because she is not familiar with the controls of the program.

“I’m not looking to change the image, I’m looking to bring out [its] potential,” he said, noting that the very concept of a purely documentary photograph is nonsense since a photograph is subjective to begin with. He offered as an example a view of a landscape which, because of their differences in height, Madigan’s view would be slightly, but importantly, different from his.

The piece, “December 21,” though a relatively simple landscape of a hill and a big sky, familiar to those who love this area, is a show-stopper both for its larger size and for its intricate play of stark chiaroscuros in the snow and warm hues in the clouds. Madigan’s earliest shot, 1970’s “Corvus,” was scanned and manipulated.

“She has this knack,” Flower said of Madigan, “for being able to understand that to create depth, you need scale” and using, for example, the wide-open aperture. “The rest is all imagined in your head, and she does that naturally.”

Curator Flower, clearly the consummate teacher, willingly conveys his passion for the technical details and possibilities inherent in photography. The entire staff are approachable and willing to explain, eager to share their love of the art they show, and are seeking new artists for possible exhibitions.

Adventure/wildlife/culture photographer-educators Dan Mead and Sally Eagle, whose work may soon be featured in the new gallery, pronounced Mad Rose’s presence “emblematic of the possibilities.” Those include new exhibitions roughly every six weeks, as well as a series of informational and educational opportunities for visitors to the village and locals alike, including rare and surely-to-be-appreciated midweek/evening events.

The mission statement on the gallery’s website outlines its philosophy and action plan for an inclusive, enriching adjunct to the community and the tri-corner region.

For musician Jonathan Fritz, who has visited his parents in Millerton frequently over the years, the addition of Mad Rose Gallery at the entry to the village is a welcome move. It’s not quite Europe, he said, where artists are given stipends to pursue their work in the “off seasons,” but Millerton is, he hopes, becoming a kind of hub for the arts, and any town that values the arts enough to welcome new spaces and faces is on the right track.

Foreground, from left: architect Ming Wu, Mad Rose Gallery owners Neal Rosenthal and photographer Kerry Madigan, Harry Kendall and Joan Krevlin, and architect Lori Kupfer. Center background: gallery associate Shannon Chapman at Mad Rose Gallery’s grand opening on Saturday, July 29. Photo by Deborah Maier