Feature, INC. | artnlab

In 1986, Feature gallery, directed by the late Hudson, first showed Ellen Sandor and (art)n’s PHSColograms in Chicago and then in Soho, New York. Hudson was a true champion of the work. Never before had a gallery shown imagery like the AIDS virus or four-dimensional mathematical models as artistic statements. Even today, New Media Arts continue to chart new waters in the art world.

In a 2014 memoriam published in Art in America, Sarah Schmerler described Hudson as “the one-named art dealer whose New York gallery Feature Inc. redefined the role of the dealer and set new standards of innovation and experimentation in the display of contemporary art.” “It is the responsibility of the galleries to challenge and broaden the market, not to acquiesce to it,” Hudson said in an interview with the artist Dike Blair in 2004 (Schmerler 2014).

Please enjoy this selection of works that were shown at Feature, Inc. with anecdotes from Hudson:

A look at art's recent buzzwords identifies our reorientation: simulation, appropriation, deconstruction, reification, contextualization, suspension, confalte, signify, collapse, rupture. And the overview of this decade's most critically regarded art-works by Prince, Sherman, Levine, Charlesworth, Lawler, Kruger, Welling, Brauntuch and Koons-reveals this common ground-the examination of text/subject, believability/fakery, and authority/multiplicity.

(art)n's PHSColograms participate in this dialogue regarding the new reality. They present images which are not only more real and believable than those found in traditional photography, but also even more fabricated and fake. As with the works by the seminal artists already mentioned, the life of art is dependent upon the willingness of the viewer to suspend his/her orientation and play both in the believability of lies and the falsehoods appearing true-to-life. When the subject of the PHSCologram is no longer an image of something in our tangible world, but rather a computer generated deformation of a four-dimensional mathematical equation, the empirical indexing of the abstract image/object becomes further obfuscated by the clarity of its representation.

-Hudson, 1987