Eye Candy Friday: Scholar's Shopper's Rock

Here's another post that honors those instances where the roadside of daily life intersects with elements of modern and post modern aesthetic.  Sometime back I shared the presence of an almost- Alberto Giacommetti work out on I-84.

Today's siting pays homage the work of Rachel Harrison whose survey exhibition  Consider the Lobster is on view at the Hessel Museum at Bard College through late December.  Holland Cotter wrote a review of the exhibition for the NY Times, and there is an accompanying slide show on the Times website.

Harrison's work marries the trappings of pop culture with confounding, often stone-like, abstract forms create moments that undercut the fetishistic tendencies of value attribution. Her artwork reposes at the crossroads of the cheap and the sublime.

In a sort of related, but reversed methodology, the Hudson Plaza strip mall on Rt 9 just south of Poughkeepsie injects a shorthand representation of the sublime into a structure of commercial messaging in its collosal signage.  The traditional form of the sign, includes an open area near the bottom, at the base of which is a medium sized boulder, mounted on a pipe which is illuminated by a transitioning selection of rainbow hued light.  The addition of the lighted rock is not not intentionally integrated enough into the whole to qualify as decoration and it's presence is not expressed passionately enough to qualify as poetry.  In fact it's rather crudely stated, though beautified(?) with a partial skein of celestial-like illumination.  The result is a perplexing drive by moment that is not any further elucidated if gazed upon for any extended period.  It's bizarre, and its an oddly true expression of art, one that presents a static familiar image which is very slightly and subversively skewed.
The floating rock and garish lighting scheme the Hudson Plaza sign presents rhymes uncannily with Harrison's globular, cementitiousl forms painted in equally garish, glitzy opalescent colors.

Your moment of immersive meditation for the weekend is here, in this 5 minute video of the rock shot at dusk sometime in June.