I felt like I "got" the installation too quickly — cool lights plus strange giant tree plus weird sounds equals psychedelic funhouse light show. It's a neat-o thrill, definitely worth checking out, but it didn't stick with me — at least partly because . . . well, actually I didn't get what Lyon was trying to convey.
What I took to be a tree — a bit abstracted, a bit cartoony, but a tree — Lyon means to evoke something more elemental. His favored motifs are crystals and branching forms drawn from fundamental natural shapes that grow by fractal expansion. Think how veins in trees resemble the courses of great rivers. The sounds in the gallery too follow this "fractal motion, it's similar but it never repeats," Lyon says. "It's kind of random. If you look at the branches on a tree, they look the same but they're not the same. I like to think of it as the shape of life."
I wish the installation did more to point you to this compelling, meaty stuff Lyon is thinking about — how we affect our environment (see: interactivity), sustainable-living (he favors recycled materials), the nature of perception (the optical effects that create the "dragon eye"), and the wondrous mysteries of existence.
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- It Does Come Easy
Ringo Starr was the best artist in the Beatles. And, I believe, the best artist to appear on Shining Time Station too. (Sorry, George Carlin.) It feels really weird to say, but it's the undisputable conclusion I drew from seeing "Ringo Starr — Artist" at Chabot Fine Art Gallery (379 Atwells Avenue, Providence, through June 27).
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Haley O'Connor, the co-founder of Stairwell Gallery, includes a few of her own photos in the gallery's new show, "Yesterday Today and Tomorrow."
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Wiharso, who lives in North Kingstown, fills 5 Traverse with a harrowing dance of demons in black silhouettes and ruddy flesh (well, charcoal, acrylic, enamel, and spray paint).
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The RISD Museum offers work by more than 175 staffers in its "RISD Biennial Faculty Exhibition 2009."
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"Since the market crash," says Curt Columbus, artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, "we've watched our ticket sales, which had been doing well, hit a wall. Almost like a cartoon animal — splat. Then we started pushing the discount ticket sales and things started to move again."
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It’s a big, curious, floating object, a leaping whale, a flying squash, a makeshift anatomy display, with a bit of carnival atmosphere.
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The sea air was cold and damp and foggy as we rode to Georges Island.
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On a quiet Sunday morning a month after the September 11 attacks, I visited the ruins of the World Trade Center. Slideshow: Joel Meyerowitz photos from Aftermath
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“I don’t think there’s a soul who likes that place,” Dan Cook tells me about 29 Palms when I walk over to his Dorchester apartment. Slideshow: “An-My Le: Small Wars” at the Rhode Island School of Design
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Austrian artist Erwin Wurm loves playing the philosopher.
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In “China seen by . . ." 14 photographers reflect and try to make sense of the industrial dynamo that is China today.
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Topics:
Museum And Gallery
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, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Mike Taylor, Michael Townsend, Jo Dery, Dale Chihuly, Jung Hong, AS220, Stairwell, Stairwell Gallery, Less
