DeCordova looks ahead with Andy Goldsworthy and Ursula von Rydingsvard

Museum And Gallery

Forty whacks

Goody-B. Wiseman channels Lizzie Borden, ‘Fetish Gesture’ at GASP, and Tomi Ungerer at the BPL

By RANDI HOPKINS | March 14, 2006

GOODY -B. WISEMAN: from I Love You More Than Life (And That's Not Saying Much). In real life, the Victorian Fall River home where Lizzie Borden’s stepmother and father were found hacked to death on August 4, 1892, is now the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast — you can even book a stay in the room where Abby Borden was murdered, then enjoy a breakfast similar to the one the Bordens likely ate on the morning before the murders, including bananas, johnny cakes, and sugar cookies. Lizzie, who was in fact acquitted of the crime (though she’s permanently linked to it in popular imagination), and her hideous tale provide a spooky point of departure for LA-based artist Goody-B. Wiseman, whose interest in stories of loss and losers has led her to create morbid and humorous works including a subtitled film hinting at an abusive relationship between stuffed animals.

In “Goody-B. Wiseman: I Love You More Than Life (and That’s Not Saying Much),” which opens at South Boston’s new Second Gallery on March 25, the artist creates a scene of divine Victorian elegance and decrepitude, a mysterious drawing room that’s been abandoned, with only its ghosts left. A love letter to Ms. Borden in the form of a film addresses sex, violence, and the occult. Second Gallery pairs this with a new project by “Alexandre Singh: A Thousand and One Knights of the Round Table of Knottingham.” The New York–based artist’s installation involves a 20-minute animated video that explores myths of modernism and formalism (with Yves Klein as a jungle shaman and Kurt Schwitters as an inventor lost in a maze of his own creation), all viewed in an elaborate sculptural arrangement of consumer and building materials like carpeting, Pepsi bottles, and plywood — you’ll feel right at home.

If eyes are the window to the soul, hands are surely the path back out, our road to connection and expression. We use our own hands, and scrutinize everyone else’s, to convey or comprehend innumerable conscious and unconscious messages. “Fetish Gesture,” which opens at GASP on March 24, includes work by seven artists (including the show’s curator, Ben Sloat) in which such gestures play a central role. Hands are captured in the evocative act of offering food in Amy Montali’s photographs, for example, and seen by implication in the outlines that Jowhara AlSaud draws onto the negatives of her photographs.

The fine hand of illustrator Tomi Ungerer is the subject of a free gallery talk by curator Stephanie Molinard at the Boston Public Library on March 18. Organized by the Boston/Strasbourg Sister City Association and up through March 31, “The Human Comedy: Drawings and Posters by Tomi Ungerer” exhibits some 60 works. Ungerer is best known for his children’s books; the BPL showcases the wonderful political cartoons and posters that reflect his concern for contemporary social issues.

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On the Web:

Second Gallery: www.secondgallery.org

GASP: www397.pair.com/gasp1/#

Tomi Ungerer: www.boston-strasbourg.org

Related: Into the heart of sharkness, Heart of sharkness, On the jazz, More

Into the heart of sharkness
Unless you are a spectacularly moronic daredevil hell-bent on getting shark-shanked, New Englanders are more likely to be mowed down by a molasses tsunami or felled by Lizzie Borden's ax than they are to die in the maw of Jaws.
Heart of sharkness
Unless you are a spectacularly moronic Masshole hell-bent on getting shark-shanked, New Englanders are more likely to be mowed down by a molasses tsunami or felled by Lizzie Borden's ax than they are to die in the maw of Jaws.
On the jazz
The fluid line between repulsion and fascination is a quintessentially American seduction — think of P.T. Barnum's creepy chimerical "creatures," of Lizzie Borden, of a certain rogue hate-monger up in the Great White North. Perhaps because of the nation's Puritan underpinnings, moral disgust holds a particular allure, prompting that guilty-pleasurable urge to rubberneck.
She is . . .
This group exhibition makes its collective point right off the bat: there is no single legitimate way to visually express what it’s like to be a woman, and even women who know who they are will be apt to waver in that perception.
While you were out . . .
When you’re a student, it can seem as if reality just freezes when you leave town for the summer.
New insurance, no assurance
Let’s see, we start with a government-enforced policy about a life-and-death issue.
Unpleasantness at the BPL
Why would the library’s trustees give the boot to a leader who has proved to be a triple-threat talent?
What? This old thing?
Glossy guidebooks often extol Boston as one of America’s most “European” cities, a euphemism that means that we’re . . . you know, wicked old.
Role model?
John Waters gets up close and personal
V66 revisited
A new film looks fondly back on 'the poor man's MTV'
Harvard ‘ACT UP’ show gets rise from right-wingers
Taking a detour from directly bashing President Obama, right-wingers are now hot and bothered by a Harvard art exhibit. And they have an Obama administration foil toward whom they can channel their bile.
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Topics: Museum And Gallery , Boston Public Library, Crime, Murder and Homicide, More

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