In Orange artist Amy Borezo’s soft, sensitive gouache and acrylic paintings, forms melt into abstract islands floating amid white expanses of paper. Gods Eye (2007) includes a rainbow-striped diamond (like one of those “God’s Eye” yarn-and-stick things), some green steps, a brown shadow, a couple in snow gear running arm in arm.
The show is rounded out by Bostonian Katie Osediacz’s jittery videos of a horse’s eye and electric wires seen from a moving train and Cambridge artist Juan José Barboza-Gubo’s paintings in which he scrawls abstract patches of color atop realistic Christian images. (I suspect he’s working out some issues.)
A lot of this stuff feels young and art-schooly — which is appropriate, since several of the artists are fresh out of school. (Short is still working his way toward his undergraduate degree.) The work has its enthusiasm to recommend it, but much of it feels imitative, as if the artists were still working their way to their own voices by test-driving familiar styles.
PENDULOUS NEST: 1 Linda Byrne goes after
those plastic rings that snare marine birds. |
“New Art ’07” at Kingston Gallery is a national juried show in which guest curator Nato Thompson, a former Mass MoCA curator who recently became a curator and producer for Creative Time in New York, weeded through more than 500 submissions to choose 29 artists, each of whom has a single piece featured here. The result is another mixed bag that could benefit from having fewer artists and offering more pieces by each one.Bostonian Joe Kitsch’s 2007 bright fun painting Sacco and Vanzetti features the title as a blocky digital-style banner over a pair of middle-finger-waving Mooninites from the TV show Aqua Teen Hunger Force. It’s an amusing homage to the brouhaha over the Mooninite guerrilla marketing advertisements (a/k/a corporate vandalism) that caused Massachusetts officials to shut down Boston roads and trains back in January when one of the Lite-Brite-style signs was found stuck to the underside of Route 93 in Charlestown.
Kitsch (his “brush name,” according to his Web site) is a witty, poppy artist. This painting comes from his series on mass hysteria, which includes the Salem witch scare, the interment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the 1951 Rosenberg trial. He’s right to say that officials — at least initially — overreacted to the Mooninite kafuffle, but his analogy is off: comparing that to Salem and interment and executions is like comparing small-time dictators to Hitler.
New Yorker Linda Byrne’s Pendulous Nest 1 (2005) is a cocoon-like nest made of plastic six-pack rings dangling from a tree branch. The sculpture is a satisfying example of an increasingly prevalent art genre: environmental art crafted from recycled materials. Motivated by her dismay over bird extinctions and the “decay and destruction of our environment,” she fashions a nest from the plastic rings that have become infamous for tangling and strangling marine birds. (It should be noted that the primary manufacturer long ago switched to a plastic that self-destructs in sunlight.)
Greenfield artist Chris Cooper’s Self-Portrait with Allegory of Creativity: You Can Lead It to Water is a small dreamlike painting of a man and centaur-like creature (man’s chest, dog’s body) standing at the edge of water. Cooper is a skilled realist painter, but I wish he were less literal and uptight with his allegories (his titles don’t help) and just let his curious dramas play out. Cambridge artist Hwae Jung’s 2007 sculpture Bundled Cloud is a big wad of white and blue tissue paper sitting atop a small stepladder. It’s a bit too cute, but the arrangement is tender, like lending a hand to a cloud in need of support.
