Jeff Bailey Gallery / Hudson is pleased to present Tossed, a group exhibition organized by Jennifer Coates and Rachel Schmidhofer, opening on Saturday, August 16, from 6-8pm.

First you chop your vegetables and put them in a bowl. After adding some fruits, meats, cheeses and/or nuts, you douse the whole mess in a viscous “dressing” and give it a good TOSS. The satisfaction of the well-tossed salad is profound. Don’t forget to leave a few sodden greens at the bottom of your bowl: rejects that have succumbed to the muck, cautionary tales to other greens against the pitfalls of lubricated excess.

Salad embodies transformation: through salad we can trace order to chaos to bowl smear.

Let us consider the history of the human relationship to the vegetable, from the original wild mustard that grandfathered all the subsequent leafy greens, to the agricultural innovations that have evolved through the millennia to provide us with chilly produce sections, lousy with neatly organized, color-coded, nutrient-poor, out-of-season items.

Salad makes promises, punishes, disappoints and redeems. Salad can make you thin, it can make you sad, it can make you love yourself, or it can banish you to bitter, soggy purgatory.

Look closely and you will see that the construction of a salad is analogous to the artwork - the anticipation, the corralling of disparate elements, the acute physicality, the climax and/or anticlimax. Orchestration and alchemy shape the outcome of both salad and art.

With works by: Jennifer Coates, Holly Coulis, Steve DiBenedetto, David Humphrey, Irena Jurek, Alisha Kerlin, Wayne Koestenbaum, Austin Lee, Joshua Marsh, Scott Penkava, Alexander Ross, Lisa Sanditz, Rachel Schmidhofer and Michelle Segre.