A MODEST BLISS-OUT Goulis's Television II. |
Montford's artworks may be most powerful on the street, where their strangeness can stop you in your tracks and his fiercely direct statements stand out amidst the noise. In galleries, we're used to more contemplative works and Montford's directness can feel like hectoring. Here, Montford seems to want to draw connections between our nation's founding episodes and black, white, and Native Americans, but it's not clear. Perhaps it's too indirect?
Ellen Wetmore of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, speaks of the oddity and exhaustion of becoming a mom in a series of short, witty, surreal videos. In Sleep Deprivation Will Be Televised, her head is a television lolling back and forth with fatigue. Another video shows her arm burning to ash; a third shows creepy eyes appearing across her pregnant belly.
Richard Goulis displays a sculpture that looks like an old console television with a handsome mahogany cabinet, cast iron doors (like on a furnace), and a rippled glass screen that resembles ice. A video monitor apparently hidden inside creates a vision of movement, but through the rippled glass it's unclear of just what. It suggests static, or a green and orange waterfall flowing upward. It's a modest psychedelic bliss-out.
Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Television, Museums, Ellen Wetmore, More 
, Television, Museums, Ellen Wetmore, Rhode Island College, James Montford, Wheeler School, Richard Goulis, Art, galleries, Bannister Gallery, Less 
