State of the art

By GREG COOK  |  May 28, 2008

Milton Stevenson’s The Beginning of My Ascent to the Center of the Universe is a large flashy jokey installation in ’80s DayGlo rainbow colors of cardboard cutouts of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, framed celebrity pictures (Mr. T, Erkel, Bill Cosby, Will Smith), celebrity magazine covers with googly eyes pasted onto the faces of Britney Spears and Tom Cruise, and plastic toys stuck on striped sticks. It looks like something that escaped from a neighborhood carnival midway. I mean that in a good way. Smart-alecky slogans proclaim: “Note to Rachael Ray: Delish is not a word”; “Note to Brooklyn: Your pants are too tight”; “I had sex with a robot.” Stevenson slathers on too much obnoxious badass snark for me, but it taps something magnetic in our celebrity-driven trash culture.

Also notable are Sungee Pae’s delicate etchings and screenprints of trees and parking lots; Amanda Lebel’s large annotated drawing of a minibus; Natalie Wright’s cartoony line drawings of family photographs which become wallpaper patterns; Mark Nicholson’s gray wool felt chair; Jueun Chung’s  accordion book mandala; Andrew Khoo’s mama computer and baby robot; and Zeke Leonard’s Boat Chair, which looks like a red oak dory hung upright from its bow and swinging from a steel chain.

< prev  1  |  2  | 
  Topics: Museum And Gallery , Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Celebrity News,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY GREG COOK
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   A REALLY BIG SHOW!  |  May 21, 2013
    This showcase of tomorrow's-art-stars-today is both invigorating and overwhelming, with work by 194 students.
  •   CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN  |  May 13, 2013
    What does it mean to be a man? That's the question at the heart of this smart, sumptuous exhibit — one of the best shows in the region this year.
  •   MERRY PRANKSTERS  |  May 07, 2013
    Parked out front of Brown University's gray modernist Granoff Center on a recent sunny morning were one of those 15-foot-tall inflatable rats that unions install in front of businesses they're protesting and a limousine sloppily painted to resemble a yellow and black school bus.
  •   ALTERED IMAGES  |  April 30, 2013
    Among the handsome Washington Street storefronts of AS220's renovated Mercantile Block building, with their neo-old-timey signs, is the residents' entrance to the building. It is against AS220's religion to leave any space empty that can be filled with art. So the lobby is the AS220 Resident Gallery, which occupants of the building take turns filling with their stuff.
  •   IN THE CITY  |  April 23, 2013
    One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Providence art scene is how the city itself has been such a rich subject. A decade ago, the city became a galvanizing topic as artists fought to protect the old mills that served as their homes and studios from demolition — with mixed success. But lately, the community's industrial architecture itself has attracted artists' attention.

 See all articles by: GREG COOK