Review: Growing up fast in 'Dancing Your Bedroom'

By GREG COOK | March 30, 2011

CLOSE-UP Shaw's I (in) visible.

Hunter's monologue about the joys of leading a youth dance troupe felt self-serving; her choreography is standard-issue ballet-derived modern dance, but the young dancers put it across nicely. And the physical presence of the young women in leotards rolling around in the beds upped the ante of intimacy and teen self-consciousness.

At Providence Optical (75 Weybosset Street, Providence, through April 9), AS220's Project Space is presenting Anne Shaw's installation "Inscapes." Shelves along the walls of the gallery display 14 microscopes. Look in and you find slides of an eyelash, heart muscle, earwax, testis, tapeworm eggs, and so on. (Shaw says they're all real.) Focus the lens one way and you see pink bubbles or the purple marbling of the biological materials, but when you shift focus slightly, a snippet of text appears. Together they seem to form a poem (though the order you read the lines may differ from other visitors): "What body I inhabit . . . who will find/me foundered/I (in) visible/resident/of what intrepid air?/What severs me will serve/solitude." Shaw's concrete poem has potential, but the pairing of lines like "I (in) visible" with a slide of a hair follicle or "solitude" with a pink smear of phlegm doesn't quite spark.

Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.

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ARTICLES BY GREG COOK

CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN | May 13, 2013
What does it mean to be a man? That's the question at the heart of this smart, sumptuous exhibit — one of the best shows in the region this year.

MERRY PRANKSTERS | May 07, 2013
Parked out front of Brown University's gray modernist Granoff Center on a recent sunny morning were one of those 15-foot-tall inflatable rats that unions install in front of businesses they're protesting and a limousine sloppily painted to resemble a yellow and black school bus.

ALTERED IMAGES | April 30, 2013
Among the handsome Washington Street storefronts of AS220's renovated Mercantile Block building, with their neo-old-timey signs, is the residents' entrance to the building. It is against AS220's religion to leave any space empty that can be filled with art. So the lobby is the AS220 Resident Gallery, which occupants of the building take turns filling with their stuff.

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One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Providence art scene is how the city itself has been such a rich subject. A decade ago, the city became a galvanizing topic as artists fought to protect the old mills that served as their homes and studios from demolition — with mixed success. But lately, the community's industrial architecture itself has attracted artists' attention.

THE AFTERMATH OF ATROCITY | April 16, 2013
From the ruins of the Iraq war emerges Wafaa Bilal's "The Ashes Series" and Daniel Heyman's "I Am Sorry It Is So Difficult To Start," on view at Brown University's Bell Gallery.