UNSETTLING DETAIL Capellan's Mar Caribe (Caribbean Sea).
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"Nature/Artifice" at the RISD Museum (224 Benefit Street, Providence, through February 2010) feels summery, but it's not like lite beach reading. I think it has to do with the one-room show's crisp, fresh feel and the platform full of flip-flops.
Tony Capellan's Mar Caribe (Caribbean Sea) (1996) aims to suggest the difficulty of life in his native Dominican Republic by collecting hundreds of sea blue and green flip-flops that washed up along the banks of the Ozama River in the Santo Domingo. He carefully arranges the foam sandals so they all face the same direction, suggesting fish scales or waves. Then it gives you a shiver when you notice that the toe straps have been replaced with barbed wire. You can feel it biting between your toes.
The show's title suggests a rumination on natural versus artificial, but mostly it's a broad name that allows RISD contemporary art curator Judith Tannenbaum to pull out a loosely linked grab bag of 13 works from the museum's collection, mostly recent acquisitions that have not been shown here before. There are some international stars (Damien Hirst, Joseph Beuys, Christian Marclay) and some local talent. With the RISD Museum scheduled to close during August to save money during our Not-So-Great Depression, perhaps now is the time to check out what you'll be missing.
Roger Hiorns, a finalist for this year's Turner Prize, an award for British artists that is administered by London's Tate, is represented by an untitled 2005 sculpture featuring thistles strapped here and there to steel rods leaning against the gallery wall. It's typical forgettable deadpan minimalism, except that he dipped the plants in copper sulfate, which crystallized and turned a ravishing, radiant ultramarine blue.
NEWPORT VIEW McNally's Kings Beach.
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Damien Hirst offers Utopia (2008), a mandala of shimmering butterfly wings that continues the Brit bad boy's trademark exploration of death and beauty — though this iteration feels rote. British artist Richard Long arranges brown and gray stones in an ellipse on the gallery floor for his Mountainside Ellipse (1999). I suppose it aims to evoke the outskirts of Athens, Greece, where he collected the rocks. The sculpture appears in your peripheral vision as you look at the other art. It works nicely that way, but when I stop to focus on it, the strictness of its border feels uptight.
Locals include Sue McNally of Newport and Duane Slick, a RISD painting teacher who lives in North Providence. Slick's painting Oration at Dawn is part of his long, thoughtful exploration of white-on-white minimalism, personal identity, and his Native American roots. This painting features the artist's ghostly profile floating under spectral flowers. McNally's painting Kings Beach (2007) is a stylized view of the Newport shore: white waves crashing over brown rocks in a green sea under chunky concrete clouds. The clouds are great — like something out of Marsden Hartley — but the rest is saccharin.
