TREE TOP TRADING POST Jungil Hong’s Hieronymus Bosch-style apocalypses by way of Terry Gilliam are this year’s standouts. |
Elke Morris makes sweet color photos of the ramshackle working-class neighborhoods of Lewiston, Maine, where she resides. Like a number of artists these days — Miklos Gaál and Olivo Barbieri are the best-known — she blurs out parts of her scenes so that what’s in focus resembles toy models. The effect is odd but alluring.Nathalie Miebach of Brookline and Ria Brodell of Jamaica Plain show the promise of work that’s still in development. Miebach’s sculptures resemble the mutant offspring of basketry and Tinkertoys. She tracks tides, moon phases, bird sightings, and weather and turns her data into abstract woven reed sculptures that look like 3-D computer models. The idea is compelling; the sculptures are fussy and unsatisfying. Miebach is fascinated by the patterns that emerge when you map information, but the information itself is frustratingly inscrutable, and it constricts her forms.
Brodell’s cartoony paintings and drawings illustrate an invented fairy-tale world of whales, submarines, Wormbunnies, Birdmen, and Sodmonsters. There’s one lovely painting of a whale and a sub tootling along in water filled with bubbles and drips. But many of her scenes seem constrained by her story, a fable about war and our stewardship of the earth. I’d like to see more of the sculptures here — a baby gray Wormbunny curled up with an adult, mud monsters with threatening stalactite teeth and marsh grass hair. Imagine the visceral charge of being surrounded by these things.
DeCordova curators have a predilection for divertingly handsome craft, a predilection that can make the institution seem square. Sarah Amos of East Fairfield, Vermont, does biomorphic abstract prints filled with wiggly stripes, speckled fish-scale patterns, and chains of dotted lines. Anne Lilly of Allston offers a series of minimalist steel whirligigs resembling engineers’ toys for modeling the motion of prairie grass in the wind, theme-park rides, or radar arrays. Sandra Allen of Hingham presents a 37-foot-tall photo-realist pencil drawing of the braided trunk of a palm tree on the tall narrow wall at the bottom of the museum’s stairwell. There’s formal accomplishment here, but not any intrigue or friction or sense of surprise that would lead you to bigger thoughts, something to chew over once you leave the room.
Regardless of any individual year’s shortcomings, the Annual Exhibition is a rare thing among local art institutions and deserving of praise. It’s important to bring in art made elsewhere for our edification, entertainment, and inspiration, but a majority of local institutional exhibits feature out-of-towners. I’d like to see the balance shift a bit toward what’s grown locally. Look at the way the Museum of Fine Arts mixes local art into its programming: right now there’s Edward Hopper’s New England paintings, prints by Michael Mazur of Cambridge, a recently acquired painting by Bostonian Allan Crite, and, in “War and Discontent,” Bostonian Suara Welitoff and the late Philip Guston, who taught at Boston University from 1973 to ’78.
And the complaint about grading on a curve? A glance at the “Annual Exhibition” alumni refutes that charge — those of the past decade include Laylah Ali, Ambreen Butt, Lalla Essaydi, Steve Hollinger, Joe Johnson, Brian Knep, Laura McPhee, Abelardo Morell, Jane Smaldone, Barbara Takenaga, and Sarah Walker. These are standout local artists; several have growing national reputations. They’re proof that local favoritism done well encourages our artists to keep at it, and keep at it here.
