Karon Davis, Game, 9.43AM (Frankie), 2020. Plaster, plaster strips, wire mesh, glass eyes, school desk and dictionary. Photo Wm Jaeger

Feedback, Installation View 1. Photo Wm Jaeger

Feedback, Installation View 2. Photo Wm Jaeger

John Buck, State of the Union, 2014. Jelutong wood, acrylic paint on canvas, motor, linocut print on wood, plastic chains, nylon string. Photo William Jaeger

Hilary Pecis, Visiting Michelle, 2020. Acrylic on canvas. Photo Wm Jaeger

Muna El Fituri, Darkness Visible, 2020. B&W Photographs. Photo Wm Jaeger

Rose B. Simpson, Old Masters, 2021. Ceramic, Leather, Steel. Photo Wm Jaeger

Sanford Biggers, God Whistle, 2020. White marble. Photo Wm Jaeger

Becky Suss, Logan Family Home, 2020. Oil on canvas. Photo Wm Jaeger

Roy Dowell, Untitled #1163, 2020. Acrylic on linen over panel. Photo Wm Jaeger

In the show called “Feedback” at The School, Jack Shainman Gallery’s Kinderhook location, feedback is not that screech in your speakers when the mic feeds the sound into a loop. Feedback here is what is bounced back in an investigation, a kind of cause-and-effect, or self-regulation.

This new and necessarily large show takes off from an expansive idea of learning. These artworks by some two dozen artists are responses to stimuli, obvious or subliminal, spoon-fed or discovered. They create a syncretic cocktail from a chorus of divergent voices.

Take Karon Davis’ jarring sculptural depiction of a girl hiding under a school desk, in play or in fear. She’s made of pure white plaster, her vivid glass eyes staring up. Or read Steve Locke’s loaded blue neon phrase: “I Remember Everything You Taught Me Here.” Yes, school surely teaches us things, just not always the things that were intended.

Most of the show is not so literal. There is a feeling in the many figural sculptures and paintings that we are celebrating a new vision of what curator Helen Molesworth calls “America.” Many Black subjects amidst a wholesome diversity give the show an insider feeling for a complicated nation, avoiding stereotypes. Of course, that means this is just one version of the U.S., but it’s a welcome embrace of what for so long has been marginalized.

Among the many figural sculptures are several that seem especially pained, as if the struggle for relevance and clarity comes at a high price. “God Whistle” by Sanford Biggers is a life-sized marble figure within its own small room. The large head with its eyes closed seems pensive and at peace, even though a rectangular extraction has been made, as if by an unfeeling machine, from one side of the body.

The pair of tightly bound figures in a similarly somber work by Rose B. Simpson mixes several materials to give a textural, almost historical richness that implies a narrative of survival. John Buck’s ambitious “State of the Union” is not only big and wild — made mostly of carved wood — it’s also acerbic, poking fun at the U.S. political establishment.

Sculpture cameos in the forceful wall of large, rich, black-and-white photographs by Muna El Fituri, where bodies interact with a huge mound of mud or clay. You might not know at first whether the figures are actually sculptures or whether they are people covered in mud and emerging, or submerging, in a photographed performance.

All of this work is visually stunning, beautifully crafted, and dramatic. While there are pieces in “Feedback” that toil over familiar formal ground — neon sentences included, as well as the hallway of photographs applied to translucent fabric hanging like clothes out to dry — the statements behind them fit into the ongoing themes of Black subject matter and the boundaries of indoctrination.

In the many paintings, often quite large, the content becomes more tempered, and one might say more nuanced. I was particularly drawn to the carefully structured works by Becky Suss, showing interiors without people but with cues about lifestyle, and detailed with pictures within pictures. Roy Dowell’s smaller works further ideas of surface and design with joyous textural geometries.

The near-abstraction of a few works balances some of the blatant declarations of others. Like other expansive group shows trying to tap into the newest trends in the arts — the Whitney Biennial, for one — “Feedback” makes the most of any weaknesses with really new, pertinent, provocative and gorgeous artwork. It makes for a complex and meaningful exhibition, which of course means: Go. See it.  

Where: The School, 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY 

Hours:     Saturday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. 

Info: www.jackshainman.com or 518-758-1628 

Related: A Hudson Valley art tour that skips all the usual stops

Jaeger has been teaching in the Art Department at the University at Albany for over twenty years. He identifies as a photographer and also writes about photography and art. He avoids social media as much as possible. You can reach him at wmjaeger@gmail.com.