DREAMSCAPE: Rabbia creates a montage of images from Mrs. Gardner’s Chinese scrapbook
intercut with her own video and animation. |
“Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008” |
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 The Fenway, Boston | Through September 26
“Accommodating Nature: The Photographs Of Frank Gohlke” |
Addison Gallery, Phillips Academy, 180 Main St, Andover | Through July 13 |
In the fall of 1883, Isabella Stewart Gardner — more than a decade before she would develop her museum on Boston’s Fenway — traveled to China. As she toured Shanghai and Beijing, Hong Kong, Canton, and Macao, she purchased photographs from local photographers of sights she’d seen as well as of people and things she hadn’t. She pasted all these sepia-toned pictures into a scrapbook, and that became a spark of inspiration when Luisa Rabbia was an artist-in-residence at the Gardner Museum last summer. The result is “Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008,” in which the Italian-raised, Brooklyn-based 37-year-old transforms Gardner’s old travel photos into a dream journey.Rabbia’s 27-minute video, which is now on view at the museum along with Gardner’s scrapbook, begins (and also ends) with an image from the cover of the scrapbook before proceeding in one long, leisurely pan past Gardner’s photos of temples, pagodas, and palaces. Rabbia cuts out sections and inserts her own video (gliding birds, billowing clouds, rolling waters, waving branches, fire) and bits of animation.
Water floods a lavishly appointed room (the home of a British regional governor). A whirlpool (perhaps the drain of a bath) spins in the center of a harbor. A pair of men hold guitar-like stringed instruments. Growing branches of a tree burn. Sculptures of dragons hold a globe in an astrological garden. The photos are organized not by chronology or geography but by the way one flows visually into the next, as in the disjointed order of memories.
Rabbia’s primary addition is blue lines that snake across the ground, wiggling around feet and landscapes and buildings, sometimes sprouting upward. She sees them as trees and roots. “The tree is a collection of time in itself, and roots are an expression of that,” she tells me at the museum. “And these roots have rings all around which are like the rings of time past. It’s a link from the past to the present.”
The blue lines also suggest water or veins or, when they sprout up, penises. At one point, blue lines zigzagging across a sepia landscape produce throbbing red rivers of what appears to be blood. Later a full moon rises with pulsing veins inside. (It’s actually a scan of a beating heart that Rabbia found on-line.)
Other strange visions appear: a metal ostrich lays a blue marbled egg; a naked woman lies in a courtyard and a tree sprouts from her crotch; two prisoners wait with square boards locked around their necks; a lynched individual swings from a tree; at the back of a procession people carry a breathing cocooned body atop a litter (actually a photo of a Peking wedding procession transformed here into a funeral). There is a vague suggestion of things falling apart.
New Yorker Fa Ventilato’s soundtrack adds to the thoughtful and melancholy mood, moving between Schubert’s Winterreise (“Winter Journey”) and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, with added bits of Japanese flute and Chinese violin.
There’s something missing at the heart of the piece, however. It feels as if Gardner’s photos had interested Rabbia but hadn’t particularly energized her. “Travels with Isabella” adds up to a very nice, quite pretty music video, but it’s no great shakes.
GRAIN ELEVATOR AND LIGHTNING FLASH, LAMESA, TEXAS 1975: Gohlke applies a crisp
Modernist classicism to observations of scrappy American plains landscapes. |
Travel is also often the subject of 85 landscape photos — most of them black-and-white — on view in “Accommodating Nature,” Frank Gohlke’s mid-career retrospective, which was organized by Texas’s Amon Carter Museum and is now at the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover. (The museum closes on July 13 for a renovation and expansion that is scheduled to continue until spring 2010.) The 66-year-old lived in Massachusetts from 1987 until 2007, when he moved to Arizona. He taught at MassArt on and off between 1988 and 2006.Gohlke won national recognition when he — along with Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore, Nicholas Nixon, and others — was included in the George Eastman House’s 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Their work was seen as a break from the romantic photos of apparently untouched landscapes by folks like Ansel Adams.
Gohlke’s early photos, from the 1970s, apply a crisp Modernist classicism to observations of scrappy American plains architecture and ruins. Majestic, practical grain elevators stand stoutly along railroad tracks or shimmer at the edge of a wet, black, flat Texas road as lightning crackles in the distance.
