RIDGEFIELD, CT.- The exhibition features Rackstraw Downes’s three-part painting, Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street: The North River Water Pollution Control Plant, and the many sketches and preparatory works which were part of the process of its creation. The work depicts a space which the artist describes in his journal as “very ‘ancient Rome’; Piranesi-like … with enormous columns, and some nice curves …” Typical of Downes’s work, it is an in-between space, utilitarian and majestic; a manmade space next to the Hudson River, which quietly gleams behind the trees, stage left. The paradox of Downes’s work is that at first glance, to our twenty-first-century eyes, it appears to be photo-realistic. Nothing could be further from the truth. This “snapshot” of a particular location at a particular moment