Ohwada is a future fabulist, creating mesmerizing kaleidoscopic landscapes through photo and Photoshop tricks. Here he offers a fabulous green garden cave floating in a pond of lily pads. The main structure seems to come from the same image reflected four times, so that it becomes a kaleidoscopic Rorschach test scene. But the more you see of his work, the more it feels merely gimmicky.
Rutherford is another future fabulist, but with hints of Japanese pop artist Mariko Mori. Here a woman in a see-through plastic dress and white platform shoes stands in the middle of a nowhere desert world. It seems like something out of “Barbarella,” or an advertisement for futuristic homemaker bondage cleaning kits.
Most of the work here is formally polished but terribly well behaved. And it’s all curiously similar in tone and style regardless of whether the artists hail from Poland or China or Yale University. Almost everybody works in the deadpan style that sees head-on posed photos of people with blank expressions as somehow revelatory. Everything — feeling in particular — is kept at arm’s length.
The organizers suggest that the artists are reacting to our nervous, precarious historical moment. It’s clear that deadpan is a dominant American (a/k/a New York) photo style, but is it really the universal style of this era, or is this show just a reflection of the curators’ tastes? Let’s hope there’s more variety out there in the hinterlands; otherwise we’re in for a uniformly dour future.
“Jennifer Bartlett: Early Plate Work” | Addison Gallery of American Art | Phillips Academy, 180 Main St, Andover | Though December 10
“ReGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow” | Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University | 700 Beacon St, Boston | Through November 5
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- Wilderness | (k)no(w)here
This could prove strenuous, but the album is more contemplative than didactic — a (k)no(w)here that’s difficult to study but easy to inhabit.
- Nothing's sacred
“I’ve been called anti-woman, a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American, you name it!”
- The Chair Man
It is one of the icons of 20th-century design. What distinguishes Marcel Breuer's B34 armchair from 1928 is its materials (fabric seats slung between steel tubing) and the lack of rear legs.
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As Alfred Hitchcock famously said, cinema is not a slice of life but a slice of cake. Watch the trailer for Marie Antoinette (QuickTime) Fate’s pansy: Another view of Marie Antoinette. By Clea Simon.
- Dreaming of celluloid
Of the handful of contemporary Asian shows on view in and around Boston this winter, that of Dinh Q. Lê should prove unique — if only because the Vietnamese condition is so far removed from the rest of East Asia’s cultural boom.
- Channeling Hitchcock
The classic British hero is cool, collected, witty, slightly bored, well-mannered, and possessed of lightning-fast reflexes when needed.
- Premonition
Sometimes you wake up and life seems like a badly edited movie.
- Portishead
It’s a welcome step into new territory and a more than satisfying downer dose to set against the onset of sunny days and ice cream.
- Our town
After living through decades of Big Dig construction and disruption, the average Bostonian has developed a keener design knowledge and sensitivity.
- Review: Iron Man 2
Maybe I’m just relieved that it wasn’t in 3-D, or maybe actor Justin Theroux (frequent David Lynch collaborator and co-scripter of Tropic Thunder ) is just a better writer than the law firm of scribes that pasted together the original, but Jon Favreau’s sequel to his creaky adaptation of the rusty Marvel standby Iron Man restores my lack of faith in superheroes.
- Review: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?
Not so much Werner Herzog's return to his former persnickety, off-the-wall, idiosyncratic feature-film-making self as a reprise of his greatest hits, the overloaded My Son, My Son staggers and sometimes comes to a complete halt.
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Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Culture and Lifestyle, David Lynch, Boston University, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, David Lynch, Boston University, History, Photography, Yale University, Visual Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, Art History, Cultural History, Less
