Add to this stuff Bostonian Niho Kozuru’s cast rubber sculptures — which look like towers of gleaming, translucent, molded Jell-O — and you have the exhibition’s highlights. What’s missing? Anything from New England’s art powerhouse, Providence. Was there a more thrilling local art event in recent years than the secret apartment that conceptual pranksters built in the Providence Place mall? (When outed last September, they wound up on national TV.) And it would have been nice to see something by Boston-area folks like Andrew Mowbray, Deb Todd Wheeler, Mary O’Malley, Erik Levine, and the collective the Miracle 5, all of whom have produced standout work in the past year or so.
All the work in this year’s DeCordova Annual is proficient, but nothing wows — or freaks you out. The exhibit can be grouped into variations on a theme: landscape as digital animation or a little garden; family memories as deadpan photos or cartoony paintings; technology in painting as surreal scenes or gestural abstractions.
In Jamaica Plain artist Matt Brackett’s surreal oil painting, a woman stands in water under a pier at night waving her hand over glowing yellow waves, or a woman in a fur-collared coat scuttles across an icy marsh at sunset with her arm full of oranges. Brackett sketches out compositions, stages them with models, photographs them, pastes various photos together, and then paints the composites. It recalls the photos of Gregory Crewdson, which are alternately cheesy and seductively strange, like something from David Lynch or The X-Files. Brackett’s scenes head in this direction, but they can feel forced, like studio set-ups and still-life props rather than something plucked from dreams.
Another variation of technologically backed painting is Bostonian Mark Schoening’s black-and-white abstractions that look like splatters of mud and straw. They’re built from alternating layers of painting and digital print-outs of manipulated images of architectural fragments, but this part-man part-machine hybrid doesn’t come to life.
Eva Lee of Ridgefield, Connecticut, presents Discrete Terrain: Windows on Five Emotions, digital animations that look like generic demos of some video-game landscape-generating software. There’s no way to tell from the videos themselves, but I gather they’re 3-D graphs of a dozen persons’ EEG scans as those people experienced anger, joy, fear, sadness, and disgust. No virtual landscapes for Leah Gauthier of Boston — she set up wooden trellises and was planning to plant melon seeds just outside the DeCordova galleries, as a model of sustainable living and reconnecting with the earth. The idea is facile — it needs something more. And a sign explains: “Due to the threat of frost, Leah Gauthier will be planting her melon seeds on June 1.”
Concord photographer David Prifti shoots 19th-century-style tintype portraits of individuals, couples, and S&M types who, the wall text explains, “alter their bodies in painful ways and gather to suspend themselves from their piercings”; his subjects include a lady with hooks run through her knees. The prints have an old-time glow, and a handsome way with freckles, but nothing stands out. Vanessa Tropeano of Lexington offers large boring color photos said to be inspired by family memories of a fire in a forest, a dining-room table, an iced-over pond, and blurry feet that seem to fly into the bottom of a picture.
