Bostonian Yana Payusova also explores family history — her parents’ stories and her own memories of growing up in St. Petersburg — in her magic-realist cartoons in acrylic and India ink or gouache and photographs. A girl with six nipples stands in water at a beach as flabby old ladies and men lounge on the sand behind her. In another painting, a subway car’s passengers include a two-headed woman, a man with antlers sprouting from his hat, a man collapsed on the floor, a kissing couple, and a crowned, robed man holding a cage that contains a spider creature with a human head. The scenes are finely rendered, but Payusova’s characters, all with the same exaggerated eyeshadow and bags under their eyes, are, well, repulsive.
Kirsten Reynolds of Newmarket, New Hampshire, presents an installation of jutting 2x4s and slanting walls decorated with bright patterns of hearts, flowers, and stars that looks like a Target store display gone cutely awry. Marguerite White of Newtonville creates a nautical-themed installation of chalk drawings directly on a wall, cut-out charcoal drawings, and black-and-white cut-out silhouettes that feel like a catalogue of seaside stuff you’d find in some tourist shop. I can see how the installations might have seemed like promising ideas, and they’re nicely constructed, but they ring hollow.
And that’s the problem with too much of the work here. Pleasantly crafted exteriors surround mushy, unnourishing cores.
Related:
Time after time, Wild things, Built to move, More 
- Time after time
The DeCordova Annual has been going strong since 1989, indefatigably showcasing work by New England artists chosen each year for the quality of their individual work.
- Wild things
One hundred corrugated cardboard monkeys hanging from trapezes greet visitors to “Going Ape: Confronting Animals in Contemporary Art,” which opens at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park on September 2.
- Built to move
The Institute of Contemporary Art, clearly in a nomadic frame of mind as it gears up for its own move to a new building on the Boston waterfront next fall, looks at the surprisingly long history of adaptability in domestic design.
- Talent shows
Amazing but true: each year since 1989, the tireless curatorial team at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park have scoured the New England area to put together a show highlighting artists from the area.
- Locomotion commotion
The DeCordova Museum’s “Trainscape: Installation Art for Model Railroads” is a great, wild, flawed 14-artist circus.
- Everybody poops
Recently selected as one of 17 regional artists to exhibit at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park's Biennial in January 2010 (alongside fellow Mainer Randy Regier), and awarded a grant from the Maine Arts Commission in support of her interactive sculpture "The Cashmere Iron Maiden," Greta Bank is struggling to find studio time on top of being a mother of two.
- Monkey see, monkey do
So thorough and deadpan is the joke that Catherine Chalmers pulls off in her ravishing color photographs of insects crawling across flowers they resemble that when I read the wall text I was sure there had been a mistake. Slideshow: Going Ape: Confronting Animals In Contemporary Art at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park
- Ah, painting!
“Big Bang! Abstract Painting for the 21st Century” rounds up 15 painters who reinvigorate abstraction by drawing inspiration and imagery from computers, stars and constellations, quantum physics, data mapping, the Internet, genetics, squiggly microscopic critters.
- People get ready
Fourteen New England artists/artist teams hook up to produce a variety of interconnecting installations.
- My Baby Shot Me Down
“Abstract painting” is a broad historical category that takes in everything from the utopian spiritual and formal purity of the early decades of the 20th century to the macho of the purely visual as championed by Clement Greenberg later in that century.
- Art beef
Bostonians are plenty familiar with the collaborative video works of choreographer Ann Carlson and video-installation artist Mary Ellen Strom, but the DeCordova is the site of their first major museum show.
- Less
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