RANDI HOPKINS

Time bombs

RANDI HOPKINS — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:35:58 GMT

‘Atomic Afterimage’ at Bu, Foreclosures and Risk Structures at MIT, and the Cultural DMZ At Simmons
Timely new exhibitions look at the lust for power and risky business.

Bruce Conner, Bombhead

“Atomic Afterimage” at BU Art Gallery, 855 Comm Avenue, Boston | September 5–November 2 | 617.353.3329

“Red Lines, Death Vows, Foreclosures, Risk Structures” at MIT’s Compton Gallery, Building 10-150, 77 Mass Ave, Cambridge | September 9-December 21 | 617.253.4415

“Dorothy Imagire And Ben Sloat” at Simmons College’s Trustman Gallery, 300 the Fenway [fourth floor], Boston | September 2–October 3 | 617.521.2268

Tick, tick, tick . . . something ominous is upon us. Is the end near, or is this just déjà vu? Even as Russia gets aggressive with neighboring Georgia and the American sub-prime mortgage meltdown continues to threaten our neighborhoods and the global economy, timely new exhibitions look at the lust for power and risky business.

Opening at the Boston University Art Gallery on September 5, “ATOMIC AFTERIMAGE: COLD WAR IMAGERY IN CONTEMPORARY ART” brings together work by 10 artists — among them Bruce Conner, Joy Garnett, and Richard Misrach — who reinterpret images from the era of above-ground nuclear testing (1945–1962). Garnett bases apocalyptic paintings on declassified photographs of nuclear explosions. Conner, in one fine example, uses his skillful way with collage to merge a figure wearing a military jacket with an iconic image of mushroom clouds from the first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll, reanimating (and giving a psychological dimension) to an image of power and destruction that might not seem as safely far in the past as it used to.

The complex — and currently unraveling — relationship between finance and buildings is the subject of “RED LINES, DEATH VOWS, FORECLOSURES, RISK STRUCTURES: ARCHITECTURES OF FINANCE FROM THE DEPRESSION TO THE SUB-PRIME MELTDOWN,” an exhibit by Damon Rich and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) that opens at MIT’s Compton Gallery on September 9. Rich, who founded the CUP in 1997, is trained as an architect, and in this project he investigates the history and mechanics of financing the places we call home. During his year-long residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (in 2005, well before sketchy financing schemes and lending practices across the country reached the headlines), he undertook a study of the fundamentals of real-estate markets, working with MIT students and volunteers to interview folks like the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, and hanging out with mortgage brokers in bars in Boston. In “Red Lines,” he uses video, sculpture, graphics, and photography to reveal the inner workings and nitty-gritty details of how our neighborhoods have been created and manipulated and are on the verge of being destroyed.

The devil in the details

RANDI HOPKINS — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:40:24 GMT

‘Drawn to Detail’ and ‘Laylah Ali’ at the DeCordova, Esteban Pastorino Díaz at the SMFA, and Student Loan Art Program at MIT
It’s hard to imagine stopping to look at drawings that don’t coalesce till you let them pull you in and spin you around a bit.

Laylah Ali, Untitled (2008)

In our multi-tasking, ADHD-prone world, where we watch two TV channels while texting and listening to our iPods, it’s hard to imagine stopping to look at drawings that don’t coalesce till you let them pull you in and spin you around a bit. Yet this kind of art work can also seem a canny mirror into the intricate twists and turns of our neural network, a reflection of the complexity of our cognitive experience. Opening at the DeCordova Museum on August 30, “DRAWN TO DETAIL” offers drawings by 26 artists whose work tends to the obsessive, repetitive, laborious, and intricate. The likes of Julie Mehretu, Tom Friedman, Jacob El Hanani, and Louise Marshall mix it up between the forest and the trees, sometimes losing the larger context in the act of mark making, sometimes finding order in what could be taken for total chaos. At the same time at the DeCordova, the new drawings of “LAYLAH ALI: NOTES/DRAWINGS/UNTITLED AFFLICTIONS” introduce language into Ali’s rich œuvre, as she organizes snippets of text from various sources into brief vignettes that interact with her characteristically ambiguous characters.

A hand-crafted camera mounted on a kite and a homemade stereo-panoramic camera moving at a constant speed to produce a three-dimensional image are the unusual means by which Argentine-born photographer Esteban Pastorino Díaz creates his art. “SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES: ESTEBAN PASTORINO DÍAZ” opens at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts August 29. A former student of mechanical engineering, Pastorino designs and builds each of his cameras himself, and he produces images that “see” things from a unique point of view, whether that’s the kite’s-eye perspective, or the turning of real places and people into strangely doll-like versions of themselves, or light-box presentations that, when viewed with 3-D glasses, give the disorienting illusion of movement.

Also of note: Boston Sculptors Gallery kicks off September with “THERE: MAGGIE STARK,” a mixed-media installation exploring paradoxes of time and space, and “CHRISTOPHER FROST,” with work by an artist known for his playful, transformative way with common objects. And MIT’s List Visual Arts Center opens its annual “STUDENT LOAN ART PROGRAM EXHIBITION AND LOTTERY” on September 2, with some 400 framed prints and photographs by Sarah Sze, Dana Schutz, Do-Ho-Suh and many others. Although you have to be a MIT student to borrow the work, the exhibit is open to the public.
_Randi Hopkins

One world, several dreams

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:08:48 GMT

“Business as Usual: New Video From China” at MassArt, “Text in Video” at Axiom, and “Many Kinds of Nothing” at Montserrat
It’s no secret that recent years have seen a new “cultural revolution” in the visual arts in China.

Yang Fudong, Honey

“Business As Usual: New Video From China” at Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston | August 18–September 27 | 617.879.7333

“Text In Video” at Axiom Gallery, 141 Green St, Boston | August 15–September 12 | 617.953.6413

“Many Kinds Of Nothing” at Montserrat Gallery, Montserrat College of Art, 23 Essex St, Beverly | August 23–October 26 | 978.921.4242

It’s no secret that recent years have seen a new “cultural revolution” in the visual arts in China. A generation of video artists who grew up in an era of increased creative freedom have been offering a complex take on their rapidly changing world, using personal visual vocabularies to examine aspects of their society that are just starting to come into focus for the rest of us. Opening on August 18 in the Bakalar Gallery at MassArt, “BUSINESS AS USUAL: NEW VIDEO FROM CHINA” presents work by Cao Fei and Yang Fudong, who reveal mixed feelings as they examine the relationship between swift modernization and traditional values and culture.

Cao Fei’s three-part video Whose Utopia was made during her six-month stay at OSRAM China Lighting Ltd in Foshan, one of the “big box” factories that have sprung up in China’s Pearl River Delta, where economic activity has boomed. The artist looks at workers who left their country homes to pursue big dreams in the city but ended up working in factories instead. She films them dressed as the dancers and musicians they were hoping to become, in the environment of their actual lives, the factory. Yang Fudong’s short films “City Light” and “Honey” show young urban intellectuals in their late 20s and early 30s, part of the emerging middle class in China; his work has been described as combining the lyricism of Chinese scroll painting with the stark tableaux of Jim Jarmsusch.

Ever since Bob Dylan held up and tossed away that series of cue cards with phrases from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” I’ve been a fan of looking at the written word on film. (Not that more-sophisticated visual artists weren’t also experimenting with this in the 1960s — I just like to mention Dylan when I can.) A look at the current state of video art’s ongoing relationship with the written word is the subject of “TEXT IN VIDEO,” which opens at Axiom Gallery on August 15, with works by Nance Davies, who explores the experience of private moments in public space through the writings of MBTA riders, and Tony Cokes, who animates a text by art historian and critic Julian Stallabrass.

Rubber soul

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:37:13 GMT

‘Momentum 11: Nicholas Hlobo’ at the ICA; ‘12 X 12’ in Provincetown
Pink satin ribbon, rubber inner tubes, and large swaths of flowing organza are some of the materials that Nicholas Hlobo uses in various media to examine gender, ethnicity, and his South African heritage.

Nicholas Hlobo, Injeke, 2008. Ribbon, rubber on Fabriano paper.

“Momentum 11: Nicholas Hlobo” at Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Ave, Boston | July 30–October 26, with public gallery performance July 31 from 6:30 to 7:15 pm | 617.478.3100

“Members’ 12 X 12 Open Exhibition And Silent Auction” at Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St, Provincetown | August 1-31 (bids close August 31 at 3 pm | 508.487.1750

Pink satin ribbon, rubber inner tubes, and large swaths of flowing organza are some of the materials that Nicholas Hlobo uses in various media — performances, works on paper, sculpture — to examine gender, ethnicity, and his South African heritage. Hlobo, who was born in Cape Town in 1975, is the subject of “MOMENTUM 11: NICHOLAS HLOBO,” which opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art on July 30. For this show — the 11th in the ICA’s “Momentum” series (which examines new developments in contemporary art) and the artist’s first solo exhibition at a US museum — Hlobo will create a site-specific installation centered on a large rubber and ribbon sculpture that hangs suspended in the gallery and is connected to an opening in the gallery wall by a sculptural canal, with soft light from above giving it a pink glow. Expect evocations of the inner reaches of the human body, especially the womb and related channels and passages, as well as images of restraint, resistance, and intertwining. The works are titled in Hlobo’s mother tongue, Xhosa, which is one of 11 official languages of South Africa. Hlobo’s use of the language in his work further reflects his interest in issues of identity and society.

Hlobo has also developed a performance work, “Thoba, utsale umnxeba” (approximately, “to lower oneself and make a call”), which he will present in the gallery on July 31, sitting on an African reed mat and wearing a costume that will create a ritual attachment between the artist and the gallery. After the performance, the costume, the sculptural props, and a recording of Hlobo’s voice will become part of the exhibition.

The Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) was established in 1914, and by the following year it had begun collecting and exhibiting the work of local artists. These included expatriates returning from war-torn Europe and bringing with them international influences to the outer tip of Cape Cod. Over the decades, PAAM has reflected the philosophical and æsthetic debates of the larger art world through ongoing exhibitions and educational programs. Opening at PAAM August 1, the annual “MEMBERS’ 12x12 OPEN EXHIBITION AND SILENT AUCTION” presents work by emerging and established artists, all of it created on 12x12 inch panels. The works are for sale by silent auction, with proceeds going to support PAAM and its programs.

Flora, fauna, and the female figure

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:21:52 GMT

Art Nouveau Jewelry at the MFA, ‘Players’ on MIT’s Media Test Wall, and ‘Nascent’ at NESAD
The Art Nouveau movement of the late-19th/early-20th century distanced itself from the mass production of the Industrial Revolution with elaborate, one-of-a-kind works made from unusual materials.

Emmanuel-Jules-Joseph [Joë] Descomps, Necklace with a female head and a sphinx (circa 1900)

“Imperishable Beauty: Art Nouveau Jewelry” at Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston | July 23–November 9 | 617.267.9300

“Players” at MIT List Visual Arts Center’s Media Test Wall, Whitaker Building, 21 Ames St, Cambridge | July 21–September 5 | 617.253.4400

“Nascent” at New England School of Art & Design, 75 Arlington St, Boston | July 25–August 23 | 617.573.8785

Colorful and sensual, inspired by nature’s curves and the flat visual plane of Japanese woodblock prints, the Art Nouveau movement of the late-19th/early-20th century distanced itself from Victorian and Edwardian traditionalism and the mass production of the Industrial Revolution with elaborate, one-of-a-kind works made from unusual materials. Opening at the Museum of Fine Arts on July 23, “IMPERISHABLE BEAUTY: ART NOUVEAU JEWELRY” traces the history of the style as it influenced jewelry making, with more than 100 tiny works by the likes of French artists René Lalique, George Fouquet, Eugene Feuillatre, and Lucien Gaillard, from Germany’s related Jugendstil (“youth style”), and from Belgium, Spain, and Russia, as well as by Americans like Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Eschewing the staid, diamond-and-platinum oriented adornments of the day, Art Nouveau jewelers turned to yellow gold, irregularly shaped Baroque pearls, iridescent opals, horn, ivory, and even plastic, and they used enameling techniques — champlevé, cloisonné, plique-à-jour — to add color and light. Their designs evoked the natural world through images of flora, fauna, and nymph-like women. Swans and peacocks come to mini-life next to cherry blossoms, creeping vines, female sphinxes, and marsh fairies — all crafted into brooches, necklaces, hair ornaments, and the belt buckles favored by stylish, wasp-waisted women at the turn of the last century.

Tennis-star rivals Björn Borg and John McEnroe play the role of belligerent protagonists in Peter Sis’s hand-drawn animated short film “PLAYERS.” Made in 1982 and billed as “a pre-perestroika animated satire about human aggression,” it hits MIT’s Media Test Wall beginning July 21. The Czech-born Sis is best known for his children’s books and illustrations, but he began his career in 1975 making animated films, and in 1983 he collaborated with Bob Dylan on “Gotta Serve Somebody” for MTV. In “Players,” which was directed by John Halas, with music by Czech composer Jirí Stivín, Sis mixes pop culture with historic images of war, as the tennis ball morphs into a variety of weapons, precipitating the appearance of Tarzan, a Visigoth, warriors on elephants, French revolutionaries, and, ultimately, nuclear weaponry.

Everybody get together

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:08:34 GMT

‘Boston Young Contemporaries’ at 808 Gallery, ‘Big Bugs’ at Garden in the Woods, and the 10th Annual Lantern Festival at Forest Hills Cemetery
The 808 Gallery is a BIG space to fill.

Sean M. Johnson (SMFA), Beard Washing

“Boston Young Contemporaries” at 808 Gallery, 808 Comm Ave, Boston | July 18-August 22; opening reception July 18: 6-9 pm | 281.413.4518

“David Rogers’ Big Bugs” at New England Wild Flower Society, Garden in the Woods, 180 Hemenway Road, Framingham | July 12–October 31 | 508.877.7630

“10th Annual Lantern Festival” at Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Ave, Jamaica Plain | July 17, 6-9 pm | Raindate: July 24 | 617.524.0128

The 808 Gallery is a BIG space to fill. The vast, marble-lined former Peter Fuller Cadillac showroom was acquired by Boston University in the late 1970s, and it now serves as the site of BU’s graduate-painting thesis exhibition each spring, as well as hosting other exhibitions organized by BU’s School of Visual Arts. It’s a challenging space to look at art in, with long walls that seem to go on and on, and a distracting glare from the big windows on Comm Ave. But it’s a great space in which to fête new art by newcomers. And that’s just what’s on the bill on July 18, from 6 to 9 pm, when the third annual juried exhibit of work from New England area Masters of Fine Arts programs known as the “BOSTON YOUNG CONTEMPORARIES” opens, kicking off with a live performance by DJ Ari Joseph (think bossa nova), edible food sculpture, and an award ceremony and raffle.

This year’s exhibit has 94 artists showing 159 works of painting, sculpture, photography, video, printmaking, and installation art selected by jurors Roger White, Jackie Gendel, and Tom McGrath (themselves interesting young artists). The exhibition is entirely student-run; participants this year attend MFA programs at institutions including the Art Institute of Boston, Brandeis, BU, MassArt, the Museum School, RISD, UMass-Amherst and -Dartmouth, and UNH. Join the crowd at the opening (last year’s drew more than 500 attendees) or drop by during the run — there will be a lot to look at.

If you prefer your art viewing experience to involve sunscreen and insect repellent, head for “DAVID ROGERS’ BIG BUGS” at the Garden in the Woods in Framingham. This will be the only New England appearance for the popular mega-bugs, which were last seen here in 2004. Rogers makes great use of the setting (which stretches across 45 acres and boasts 1500 varieties of native plants), employing his deft way with wood to create 13 dinosaur-scaled representations of bugs that’ll include an 18-foot, 1200-pound praying mantis. The exhibit opens on July 12 with a family-friendly day of activities and live music by the Beatles tribute band Help! Over the coming months, a different bug will be spotlit each weekend, from ladybugs (July 19-20) to ants (August 9-10) and daddy longlegs (September 13-14).

Cape light

RANDI HOPKINS — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:23:37 GMT

‘Light And Artifice’ at The Schoolhouse Gallery; ‘What Is Big?’ at Brickbottom; ‘Birds Do It’ at Montserrat
Pinpricks and irregular streaks of light illuminate a circular orb that might be the moon, or a partly peeled orange in each of Judith Larsen’s series of photographic works called “Phasing and Solon."

Andrew Sovjani, Moebius Study 1

“Light And Artifice” at Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial St, Provincetown | July 11–July 23 | 508.487.4800

“What Is Big?” at Brickbottom Gallery, 1 Fitchburg St, Somerville | July 10–August 16 | 617.776.3410

“Birds Do It: An Installation By Tin Can Sally” at Montserrat College of Art’s Schlosberg Alumni Gallery, 23 Essex St, Beverly | July 8-31 | 978.867.9604

Pinpricks and irregular streaks of light illuminate a circular orb that might be the moon, or a chambered nautilus, or a partly peeled orange in each of Judith Larsen’s series of photographic works called “Phasing and Solon.” Looking more closely, you can see that these mysterious constellations are projected onto images of human figures who are gently twisted into acrobatic or womblike positions and seem to float in the night sky. Larsen is one of six artists exhibiting in “LIGHT AND ARTIFICE,” which opens at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown on July 11. Jefferson Hayman conveys nostalgia in a wall installation of miniature photographs of the sea, New York City, and common objects, each uniquely framed. Andrew Sovjani’s interest is in light itself in photographs of precisely folded or arranged paper. Nona Hershey builds up cloud-like forms using graphite powder and rough blue Styrofoam shapes, pairing the ephemeral with the indestructible/toxic. Gina Kamentsky’s playful kinetic sculptures bring movement into the mix; Robena Malicoat’s oil paintings of Provincetown fishing boats are inspired by the light and landscape of the Outer Cape.

From the allure of a tiny woven welcome mat for a dollhouse to the visceral thrill of walking into a looming Richard Serra Torqued Ellipse, we respond to scale — to the spatially unexpected — with wonder. Opening July 10, Brickbottom Gallery’s annual summer “WHAT IS BIG?” exhibit offers work that is oversized or challenges the idea of scale by a BIG group of members of the Brickbottom Artist Association: Gabrielle Barzaghi, Amy Cain, Jean Cain, Peter Cutler, Wally Gilbert, Emily Kahn, Charlotte Kaplan, Bill Kipp, Pauline Lim, Debra Olin, Suzanne M. Packer, Felice Regan, Dan Rocha, Alyson Schultz, Obie Simonis, and John Tricomi.

Found, printed tin is the material of choice for sculptor Sally Seamans, slide librarian at Montserrat College of Art and subject of the school’s first staff exhibition of 2008, “BIRDS DO IT: AN INSTALLATION BY TIN CAN SALLY,” which opens at Montserrat’s Schlosberg Alumni Gallery July 8. Seamans — who’s been dubbed “Tin Can Sally” for her skill with containers such as those originally holding useful stuff (olive oil, spice, candy, sardines, biscuits, popcorn) — cuts the tins into many shapes, then assembles them with wire and adhesive into colorful objects and creatures including, in this show, exotic birds. Look closely and you may well recognize some of the familiar commercial materials from whence these creatures sprang.

Line up

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:50:30 GMT

Katy Fischer at Proof, ‘Paper Quilt’ and Rainey at the Essex Art Center, and ‘Ink & Steel’ at Space 242
Katy Fischer's art points to the darker forces in nature, where clouds threaten rain and rivers carry people off.

Katy Fischer, Manora's Myriad Mind

“Katy Fischer” at Proof Gallery, the Distillery, 516 East Second Street, South Boston | June 28–August 23 | 508.963.9102

“Paper Quilt” and “Bunny Bollocks” at Essex Art Center, 56 Island St, Lawrence | June 27–August 14 | 978.685.2343

“Ink & Steel” at SPACE 242, 242 East Berkeley St, Boston | June 27–July 18 | 617.426.8942 x 225

KATY FISCHER’s fine lines — which she draws using gouache on paper in repeated, hypnotic patterns — create swirls of activity as they widen out to depict rivers flowing and clouds passing in landscapes that flutter and flicker with movement. The work is sometimes populated by mystical-looking characters and objects that add a metaphoric or narrative dimension. The Chicago-based artist has expressed her wish to create “a world that opens up wide and shines and glitters with infinite, lucid details.” The art itself points to the darker forces in nature, where clouds threaten rain and rivers carry people off. Fischer’s new works on paper are the subject of a show opening at Proof Gallery in South Boston on June 28.

Quilts are loaded with lofty metaphorical associations, even as they remain the most down-to-earth domestic items imaginable. They bring to mind warmth and shelter as well as the creativity and resourcefulness and also the repetitive nature of “women’s work.” Quilts addressed issues of feminism and identity in the 1980s in work by, among others, Miriam Schapiro and Faith Ringgold, and they provide a rich theme for “PAPER QUILT,” which, curated by participating artists Gayle Caruso and Cathy McLaurin, opens at the Essex Art Center on June 27. McLaurin says that the show “grew out of our own interest in working with paper and seeing what artists are doing with paper and also our interest in quilts and seeing what people would come up with if they were asked to make a paper quilt.” The results range from wall-hung pieces to sculpture to artists’ books to site-specific installations. The 17 artists — all women — take their inspiration from sources as diverse as obituaries and Post-It Notes; they include, in addition to Caruso and McLaurin, Ilona Anderson, Linda Price-Sneddon, Amy Ross, Lois Tarlow, and Sophie Truong.

Texas artist Rainey is interested in American culture during “The Dirty Thirties,” the time when the country was ravaged by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. In “BUNNY BOLLOCKS: NEW PAINTINGS BY RAINEY,” which also opens June 27 at the Essex Art Center, she refers to popular media’s efforts to raise collective spirits at the time through songs and cartoons, as well as to period details like the problem of controlling the jack-rabbit population.

Time out of mind

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:07:05 GMT

Luisa Rabbia at the Gardner, ‘Polar Attractions’ at the Peabody Essex, And ‘Meat After Meat Joy’ at Pierre Menard
Luisa Rabbia created a slow-moving video work that offers a kind of travelogue of her own journey through Isabella Stewart Gardner's historic scrapbooks.

Luisa Rabbia, Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008

“Luisa Rabbia: Travels With Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008” at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 the Fenway, Boston | June 26–September 28 | 617.566.1401

“Polar Attractions” at Peabody Essex Museum’s Art & Nature Center, East India Square, Salem | June 28–June 7, 2009 | 866.745.1876

“Meat After Meat Joy” at Pierre Menard Gallery, 10 Arrow St, Cambridge | June 21–July 20 | 617.868.2033

Thin, bright-blue pencil lines on grounds of white, or white lines on a dark blue reminiscent of ballpoint-pen ink, often outline or define forms and figures in Luisa Rabbia’s drawings, sculpture, and video, adding a graphic quality to her work. During a residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum last year, the Italian-born, New York–based artist became interested in photographs that Isabella had collected and pasted into elaborate scrapbooks while traveling in China in 1883. In response, Rabbia created a slow-moving video work that offers a kind of travelogue of her own journey through these historic scrapbooks. Made in collaboration with experimental musician and producer Fa Ventilato, and opening at the Gardner on June 26, LUISA RABBIA: TRAVELS WITH ISABELLA, TRAVEL SCRAPBOOKS 1883/2008 shows Rabbia entering into the world of Mrs. Gardner’s photographs in part through her expressive use of line and drawing; she creates a fantastical narrative that explores the old images while bringing them to us through space and time.

Visions of the Arctic and Antarctic have both inspired artists and worried them. “POLAR ATTRACTIONS,” which opens at the Peabody Essex Museum’s Art & Nature Center on June 28, finds more than 30 North American artists responding to the polar environment and the science of climate change. Nathalie Miebach creates giant warped baskets based on scientific data culled from sources such as NASA’s ozone-watch Web site; Billy Akavak photographs the landscape and people of Kimmirut, Nanavut, an Inuit community on the south coast of Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, where he lives. The Art & Nature Center is set up to engage viewers through interactive and multimedia elements; in “Polar Attractions,” that means you’ll be able to interact with an iceberg, guide a migrating tern on its perilous journey between the poles, and post your own digital images on a museum Web site.

You wear it well

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:07:23 GMT

‘Dress • Redress’ at Brandeis, Fredo Conde at the Artists Foundation, Parade For The Future with Platform2, and June art talks at BU thanks to AIB
The relationship between our bodies and our clothing is, of course, intimate.

Andrew Thompson, Clothes Document

“Dress • Redress” at Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, 515 South St, Waltham | June 19–September 25 | 781.736.8100

“Adrift (Good Hope): Fredo Conde” at Artists Foundation at Distillery, 516 East Second St, South Boston | Through July 12; reception June 14: 3-5 pm | 617.464.3561

“Parade For The Future” at Park Street T Station, Boston [to start] | June 15: 4-5:30 pm

“June 2008 Art Talks” at Boston University, Kenmore Classroom Building, 565 Comm Ave, Room 101, Boston | June 23-26: 7:30-9:30 pm | 617.585.6770

The relationship between our bodies and our clothing is, of course, intimate: our gym clothes, our prom dresses, and our favorite jeans press up against us, holding our forms and our scent, protecting our skin and at the same time projecting our identity to the world. Attire can serve as a prompt for memory, a metaphorical stand-in for the body, and a tool for concealing or revealing who we really are — all issues that are explored in “DRESS • REDRESS,” which opens at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis on June 19, with work by eight contemporary artists. Andrew Thompson embroiders items of his own clothing with the date on which they were worn and other salient facts about his experience while in them. Sandra Eula Lee creates mixed-media works including tiny garments, sometimes on tiny hangers, from discarded materials like bills, various other paperwork, and plastic bags.

The trappings and accouterments of consumer culture have also figured in work by Fredo Conde. This Portuguese-born, Boston-based artist has created fake high-end watches and sunglasses arrayed as if for sidewalk sale in fake suitcases — whole tableaux put together using low-end materials like cardboard, foam core, tape, paint, and rhinestones. In “ADRIFT (GOOD HOPE): FREDO CONDE,” at the Artists Foundation (opening reception June 14), he turns his attention to the historical roots (and routes) of our acquisitive drive. His new work explores the race for competitive economic advantage waged by Europeans seeking to open a sea route to the riches of India and the East in the 15th century.

Hoping to raise awareness of the watery grave that may be in our future, Platform2, an experimental event series that joins creative practices with social activism, invites the public to dress in blue and gather under a giant blue wave outside the Park Street T Station on June 15 at 4 pm for a “PARADE FOR THE FUTURE” that will proceed along the neighborhood’s flood line, creating a human wave that will trace a worst-case-scenario future geography from the year 2108. Scuba divers, sharks, and seaweed will be provided, along with “music and swimming.”

Waxing poetic

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:43:32 GMT

Joanne Mattera and encaustic painting plus sculpture At Montserrat; Ceci Méndez at the Center For Latino Arts
New York–based artist Joanne Mattera wrote the book (literally) on encaustic, an ancient method of painting with pigmented wax.

Cecilia Méndez, Moladora Moliendo/Grinder Grinding

“Hue Again: Paintings By Joanne Mattera” at Montserrat College of Art’s Carol Schlosberg Alumni Gallery, 23 Essex St, Beverly | June 6–July 3 | 978.921.4242

“On The Edge: New Work In Encaustic” at Montserrat College of Art’s 301 Gallery, 301 Cabot St, Beverly | June 6–July 26 | 978.921.4242

“Palabración” at Center for Latino Arts, Jorge Hernández Cultural Center, 85 West Newton St, Boston | Through July 2; gallery talk June 18 at 6 pm | 617.927.1707 x 106

New York–based artist Joanne Mattera wrote the book (I’m not speaking figuratively) on encaustic, an ancient method of painting with pigmented wax that has provided inspiration and challenges for contemporary artists at least since Jasper Johns started messing with the thick yet translucent material in the 1950s. Mattera’s The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax is the standard reference on the subject — and her own luminous abstract works have been widely exhibited. (That includes solo shows at Arden Gallery in Boston.) Mattera, who divides her time between Manhattan and Salem, is also founder and director of the Encaustic Conference at Montserrat College of Art, and its second annual meeting is taking place this weekend. Montserrat itself is opening two related shows on June 6: “HUE AGAIN: PAINTINGS BY JOANNE MATTERA,” in the college’s Carol Schlosberg Alumni Gallery, and “ON THE EDGE: NEW WORK IN ENCAUSTIC,” at the 301 Gallery.

“Hue Again” offers works from Mattera’s “Uttar” and “Silk Road” series, in which she explores color and form through layers of encaustic applied when it is hot. Inspired by the jewel-like colors of Indian miniatures and by the small paintings of Renaissance Siena, the “Uttar” works, are built up with blocks and stacks of color; they create a mind-boggling number of variations with simple geometric elements. The “Silk Road” paintings appear as monochromes, but that effect is created through an intense depth of paint under the surface: each work is the result of some 20 layers and five or six different hues of media.

“On the Edge” is a juried exhibit of encaustic painting and sculpture, with work by 27 artists from 16 states selected by Laura Moriarty, a painter and printmaker whose own work blurs boundaries between sculpture and painting. The artists include Boston-based Linda Cordner, Deborah Kruger and Nathan Margalit, both with studios in Western Mass, Donna Hamil Talman, who’s based in Worcester, and Gregory Wright, who works in Lowell.

Live at five

RANDI HOPKINS — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:11:26 GMT

Fifth Annual Juried Summer Show at Tufts, Norman Laliberté at Montserrat, Julie Vinette at Atlantic Works, and Annual Juried Members’ Show at the Danforth
The Tufts University Art Gallery has taken the off-season opportunity to celebrate its year-round neighbors.

Randal Thurston, Wunderkammern

“5 X 5” at Tufts University Art Gallery, 40R Talbot Ave, Medford | June 5–August 10 | 617.627.3518

“Therefore & Because: Decoding Norman Laliberté” at Montserrat College of Art Gallery, 23 Essex St, Beverly | June 6–July 26 | 978.867.9604

“Influence Of Order, New Work By Julie Vinette” at Atlantic Works Gallery, 80 Border St [third floor], East Boston | June 5-28 | 617.872.2432

“Off The Wall” at Danforth Museum of Art, 123 Union Ave, Framingham | June 1–August 3 | 508.620.0050

Summer can get pretty quiet at university art galleries around town, as campuses empty out and a kind of hush descends on the higher-learning scene. For the past five years, however, the Tufts University Art Gallery has taken the off-season opportunity to celebrate its year-round neighbors, presenting juried summer exhibitions of high-caliber artists who live and/or have studios in Somerville and Medford. Opening June 5, “5 X 5” presents site-specific installations by Kyle Larabee, Mindy Nierenberg, Roy Pardi, Randal Thurston, and August Ventimiglia. Their work evinces a diversity of approaches and interests: Larabee explores the experience of new fatherhood, Nierenberg pays homage to the public library, Pardi invites you into an interactive installation of sequenced light, Thurston is inspired by Wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosity) to create a cut-paper installation spanning 40 feet of gallery wall. And Ventimiglia uses his own stride as an expressive gesture in floor drawings he creates by embedding white chalk in the treads of his running shoes and then doing laps on a surface he has painted with chalkboard paint.

The colorful paintings, prints, and sculpture of Norman Laliberté are recognized for their rich symbolism and universal themes, aspects of his work that are the jumping-off point for “THEREFORE & BECAUSE: DECODING NORMAN LALIBERTÉ,” which opens in Montserrat College of Art’s Main Gallery on June 6. Montserrat curator Leonie Bradbury has organized 30 of Laliberté’s pieces into six sections, offering you an opportunity to discover connections among the works and also pointing you to related external references. Sections include “Archeology: Ancient Cultures Re-Interpreted,” “Totems: Guardians of Time,” and “One Man’s Diary: The Artist’s Books.”

Abstract landscapes that grow out of the loose drips and streaks of thinned paint and new drawings that incorporate “stickers” to suggest real and imaginary places are both on view in “INFLUENCE OF ORDER, NEW WORK BY JULIE VINETTE,” which opens June 5 at the member-operated Atlantic Works Gallery in East Boston. All these works rely on an underlying grid structure to suggest order in the midst of activity; color is also a unifying force.

A certain kind of disorientation

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:21:21 GMT

Anish Kapoor at the ICA, MCC Award Winners at Boston Sculptors, And ‘8 in ’08’ at Massart
Home-grown new sculpture is alive and well right here right now, as Boston Sculptors Gallery regularly reminds us.

Anish Kapoor, S-Curve (2006)

“Anish Kapoor” at Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Ave, Boston | May 30–September 1 | 617.478.3181

“En Mass: Award-Winning Massachusetts Sculptors” at Boston Sculptors Gallery, 486 Harrison Ave, Boston | Through June 22; opening reception June 6 @ 6-9 pm | 617.482.7781

“8 in ’08” at Mass College of Art, Patricia Doran Graduate Gallery, 600 Huntington Ave, Boston | June 5–22 | 617.879.7000

Brilliantly colored loose pigment powder, such as that sold for ritual use at the entrances to temples in India, contributed to the surprising appearance of Bombay-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor’s earliest works in the late 1970s and early ’80s — work that seemed to add a spiritual and poetic element to Minimal forms. His career-launching early pigment work, 1000 Names (1979-’80), will be on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, along with 12 other sculptures created between 1979 and 2006, in “ANISH KAPOOR: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE,” which opens on May 30. During the ’80s, intense color began to disappear from Kapoor’s work, as the artist began to investigate voids, absence, and inner space in a way that seems to turn our thinking about sculpture inside out. In the late ’90s, he began to investigate the sensual and symbolic effects of mirrored surfaces; that led most famously to his massive, reflective Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park, a work known affectionately as “The Bean.” Kapoor, who represented Great Britain at the Venice Bienniale in 1990 and was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize in 1991, has described his interest in “a certain kind of disorientation that I hope reorients, trying to hold things to a certain stillness . . . so that somehow one is forced to slow down enough, to look, to measure with perhaps a little uncertainty in the eye, so that you have to put your hand out to affirm that what you are looking at is really there.”

Home-grown new sculpture is alive and well right here right now, too, as Boston Sculptors Gallery regularly reminds us. The cooperative gallery, which serves as a showcase for its member sculptors, is currently giving its space over to the group exhibition “EN MASS: AWARD-WINNING MASSACHUSETTS SCULPTORS,” which it’s presenting jointly with the Massachusetts Cultural Council. The contributions by the five winners of 2007 MCC Artist Fellowships in Sculpture/Installation — Alan Colby, Peggy Diggs, Matthew Hincman, Ariel Kotker, and Nick Rodrigues — include very contemporary life-sized heads carved from limestone, installations involving light, shadow, and hand-crafted common objects, and work incorporating video. Jurors for the awards included Laura Donaldson, Paul Ha, Linda Norden, and Susan Spencer Crowe.

Journey to the surface of the Earth

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:11:42 GMT

Landscape anew at Mass MoCA, ‘Exposure’ at the PRC, Dana Clancy at the Danforth, and grouped figures at GASP
Looking at the landscape brings out the artist in everyone.

Boyle Family, Study of Brown Mudtracks with Tyre Tracks and Coal Dust, Portishead

“Badlands: New Horizons In Landscape” at Mass MoCA, 87 Marshall St, North Adams | May 25 spring 2009 | 413.662.2111

“Exposure: 13TH Annual PRC Juried Exhibition” at Photographic Resource Center, 832 Comm Ave, Boston | May 23–July 2 | 617.975.0600

“Dana Clancy: Viewing Space” at Danforth Museum of Art, 123 Union Ave, Framingham | May 21–June 29 | 508.620.0050

“Figure It Out” at GASP, 362 Boylston St, Brookline | May 16–June 21 | 617.418.4308

Looking at the landscape brings out the artist in everyone. We are moved by the sight of a mountain peak, a craggy ridge of trees, or the dusty colors of the desert. But the way we see the world around us can also reflect the politics and æsthetics of our times: the romantic painters of the mid-19th-century Hudson River School reinforced ideas about America’s Manifest Destiny, depicting pristine, unspoiled landscapes, whereas photographers practicing the “New Topographics” of the mid 1970s expressed a radical, non-idealized view of the American landscape. Earth Artists of the 1960s and 1970s saw the Earth as a medium in and of itself, developing pioneering ideas about context and the ephemeral in art. And now, as questions about land use and environmental politics abound, the landscape surfaces as a particularly complex topic, one that’s explored in depth in “BADLANDS: NEW HORIZONS IN LANDSCAPE,” which opens at Mass MoCA on May 25. New commissions by Vaughn Bell, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Joe Smolinski, Nina Katchadourian, and Mary Temple will be shown alongside new and historical work by Robert Adams, the Boyle Family, Melissa Brown, Ed Ruscha, and Jennifer Steinkamp.

War, abstraction, family, and the places where people congregate are a few of the ideas engaged by the 14 photographers chosen for “EXPOSURE: THE 13TH ANNUAL PRC JURIED EXHIBITION,” which opens at the Photographic Resource Center on May 23. Guest juror Lesley A. Martin, publisher of the book-publishing program at Aperture Foundation, has selected a geographically and artistically diverse group that include locally based Cree Bruins, Lana Z. Caplan, and Robert Knight.

Dana Clancy’s paintings have been described by independent curator Rachael Arauz as taking “the act of looking” as their subject, proposing a “complex understanding of how we see with our eyes and our memory.” Clancy’s new work, with its disorienting depictions of contemporary museum architecture, is the subject of “DANA CLANCY: VIEWING SPACE,” which, curated by Arauz, opens at the Danforth Museum on May 21. Clancy uses unexpected color and extreme perspective to place you on the edges of balconies and to create other dizzying, dramatic spatial relationships.

Don’t leave me this way

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:59:39 GMT

Botanical Forms at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History, Carroll Dunham and more at the Addison, and Renzo Piano at the Fogg
Leaves lead a wild life, and each leaf’s physical structure reflects both its individual biography — revealing the pathways, for example, of insects that have eaten their way across a leaf’s surface.

Amanda Means, Peacock Plant (1992)

Leaves lead a wild life, and each leaf’s physical structure reflects both its individual biography — revealing the pathways, for example, of insects that have eaten their way across a leaf’s surface — and its evolutionary history, as varied vein patterns offer insight into the development of water and nutrient transport within a leaf. The beauty and diversity of these forms is apparent in the graphic black-and-white images of single leaves on view in “LOOKING AT LEAVES: PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMANDA MEANS,” which opens at the Harvard Museum of Natural History on May 9. What’s unusual is that the New York–based artist creates her oversized images (some as large as 50x60) without a camera; instead, she uses the leaves themselves as photographic negatives, placing each one directly in the enlarger. Describing her work via e-mail, Means writes, “I am very involved with traditional black-and-white photographic printing. I love the process and the light-filled images that result from working with these leaves.”

On the eve of a long hiatus for expansion and renovation, the Addison Gallery in Andover opens two big shows May 10, after which the museum will close its doors to the public until spring 2010. “CARROLL DUNHAM PRINTS: A SURVEY” and “THEN AND NOW” showcase the contemporary spirit and the historical sweep of the museum’s programming and collection. Dunham, who has been creating colorful, raucous, delightfully/freakishly cartoony paintings for more than 25 years, turns out to be a deft and versatile printmaker, as well; “Carroll Dunham Prints: A Survey” focuses on his graphic œuvre, with more than 100 prints dating from the 1980s to the present. “Then and Now” brings together paintings, drawings, photos, sculpture, and prints from the museum’s collection of American art, with fine examples of late-18th- through early-20th-century work plus more recent acquisitions.

Time after time

RANDI HOPKINS — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:44:22 GMT

The De C ordova Annual, New Orleans after Katrina, ‘Superartificial,’ 19th-Century Leisure Travel, and El Chango Verde
The DeCordova Annual has been going strong since 1989, indefatigably showcasing work by New England artists chosen each year for the quality of their individual work.

Matt Brackett, Distant Waves

“DeCordova Annual Exhibition” at DeCordova Museum, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln | May 10–August 17 | 781.259.8355

“Symbols of Search” at Essex Art Center, 56 Island St, Lawrence | May 29–June 29 | 978.685.2343

“Collision1101:superartificial” at Axiom Gallery, 141 Green St, Boston | May 9-25 | 617.953.6413

“Always Delightfully Cool” at Boston Athenaeum, 10-1/2 Beacon St, Boston | May 7–August 22 | 617.227.0270

“Chingasos” at New England Gallery of Latin American Art, 184 Cottage St, East Boston | May 5–June 5 | 617.418.5838

The DeCordova Annual has been going strong since 1989, indefatigably showcasing work by New England artists chosen each year for the quality of their individual work rather than for their collective cohesion under any unifying theme or broader topic. “THE 2008 DECORDOVA ANNUAL EXHIBITION,” which opens at the DeCordova Museum on May 10, presents work by 12 artists/artist teams. Keep an eye out for Mitchel Ahern’s interweaving of text, textiles, and politics, Matt Brackett’s mysterious and compelling paintings, Leah Gauthier’s heirloom melons, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things’ post-9/11 dictionary, Mark Schoening’s densely layered canvases, and Marguerite White’s fantastical, nautical installation in the DeCordova’s big window.

Eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, photographer Goodloe Suttler spent a week taking pictures of Massachusetts high-school students who had traveled to the area to help with the clean-up during their spring break. Each day, the students’ assigned work sites varied; as Suttler drove among the various locations, he was struck by large X’s spray-painted on homes by improvised search teams immediately following the disaster. His photographic record of this journey makes up “SYMBOLS OF SEARCH: PHOTOGRAPHY BY GOODLOE SUTTLER,” which opens at the Essex Art Center on May 9.

The Collision Collective, now in its sixth year of cooperative activity at the junction of art and technology, examines the irrational realm of superstition in the 13th Collision group show, “COLLISION1101:SUPERARTIFICIAL,” which opens at Axiom Gallery on May 9, taking in Tim Murdoch’s “Who’s That,” a slippery reflected image seemingly detached from the plane of a mirror, and John Slepian’s “cornered,” with a simulated shrieking creature and a tree stump. Leisure travel in 19th-century New England is up for examination in “ALWAYS DELIGHTFULLY COOL — SUMMER VACATIONS IN NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND, 1825–1900,” which opens at the Boston Athenæum on May 7. Advertising prints, photographs, maps, sheet-music covers, and more bring the area’s beaches, mountains, and lakes to life — visitors may recognize Maine’s Moosehead Lake and New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee as they appeared in the days of steamship lines and grand hotels.

Dystopia now!

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:42:46 GMT

‘Alexis Rockman,’ ‘The New Authentics,’ and ‘Paper Trail II’ at the Rose, and Chantal Akerman at MIT
Our species seems to have a serious love/hate relationship with nature, as in “can’t live with it, can’t live without it.”

Chantal Akerman, Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre (Women of Antwerp in November)

Our species seems to have a serious love/hate relationship with nature, as in “can’t live with it, can’t live without it.” In early, unsettling work, Alexis Rockman created 3-D wall dioramas with a natural-history-museum feel, using trompe-l’œil painting, trash, and animal carcasses, among other material, to depict mini-narratives set in locales such as a suburban home or a golf course, with a cast of characters that included rodents and road kill, all fixed beneath several inches of resin. His more recent, fantastical, post-apocalyptic paintings take on genetic engineering and global warming, and over the past two years, he’s been making works on paper, addressing what looks like the rapidly approaching catastrophe of climate change with a mix of awe and horror. “ALEXIS ROCKMAN: THE WEIGHT OF AIR,” opening at Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum May 8, is the first museum show of his latest pieces.

Also opening May 8 at the Rose, work by three artists: Ludwig Schwarz, who last year transformed a New York gallery into some sort of a pizza kitchen, combining spices, paintings, and video; Collier Schorr, best known for portraits of adolescents that gently blast to the puzzling heart of questions of gender, sexuality, and nationality; and David Altmejd, whose installation as Canada’s representative to the Venice Biennale last summer featured birds, squirrels, and half-human, half-bird bodies. So what do these three have in common? They are all Jewish, though their levels of Jewish education and affiliation vary, and they are three of 16 Jewish artists in “THE NEW AUTHENTICS: ARTISTS OF THE POST-JEWISH GENERATION.” Exploring cultural, ethnic, and religious identity in the US today, the exhibit focuses on artists born in the 1960s and 1970s who do not define themselves primarily as Jews but whose work was in some way shaped by their Jewish backgrounds. Meanwhile, in the Rose’s Lee Gallery, “PAPER TRAIL II,” curated by artist Odili Donald Odita, showcases work from the Rose’s permanent collection integrated with Odita’s.

Nice day for a white wedding

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:18:43 GMT

‘Wedded Bliss’ at the Peabody Essex, Toys and Games at the Revolving Museum, and Chad Walker at Space 242
In the song, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, but who knows what that’s supposed to mean.

Christian Lacroix, Wedding Cake Dress

In the song, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, but who knows what that’s supposed to mean. Over the past three centuries, around the world, marriage has represented many things, from a negotiated contractual agreement to a cementing of interfamilial power relationships to an ideal of soul mates finding common bliss. But the wedding ceremony itself stands alone — a fascinating, complex ritual that reflects the hopes of each culture for its future. Opening April 26 at the Peabody Essex Museum, “WEDDED BLISS: THE MARRIAGE OF ART AND CEREMONY” explores the subject with paintings, sculpture, textiles, jewelry, and more from the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. It’s organized under five headings: “Wedding in White” (symbolism and history of the Princess Bride look, including Christian Lacroix’s groovy dress in which the bride can double as the cake); “Artful Negotiations” (images of the transactional aspects of marriage); “Color and Symbolism in Wedding Attire” (alternatives to the modern Western tradition); “Art and Ceremony” (including a full-size wedding chuppah or canopy); and “Remembrance” (including a Civil War–era anniversary gift from Tiffany’s). Work from William Hogarth to Jacob Lawrence to Lesley Dill will be on view alongside such objects as a jewel-encrusted, late-19th-century Russian “nuptial crown” and colorful silk Chinese wedding gown.

Recent research recognizing the significance of play in our lives has raised concern about the diminishing amount of it these days. “TOYS AND GAMES: MORE THAN AMUSEMENT,” which opened at the Revolving Museum on Valentine’s Day with artwork examining the æsthetics of playful genres like video and computer games, dolls, puzzles, and TV game shows, holds a second opening on May 1 to showcase art by the Museum’s Artbotics Program, a youth after-school affair run in partnership with UMass-Lowell’s computer-science and robotics departments. Innovative, interactive work by the young creators joins Chelmsford-based Laura Mayotte’s “Quilt Memory Game” and a series of images titled “Buy Me Something” produced during photographer Nat Ward’s recent workshop at a Toys “R” Us in Nashua.

Some Spaniards in the works

RANDI HOPKINS — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:00:18 GMT

‘El Greco to Velázquez’ at the MFA, ‘Artadia Boston’ at the Mills Gallery, Harmonious Noise on the Roof at Tufts, and Animal Estates at MIT’s CAVS
With his elongated forms and spiritual intensity, Greek-born Domenikos Theotokopoulos is often seen as expressing the passion of Counter-Reformation Spain.

In our nature

RANDI HOPKINS — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:05:00 GMT

Frank Gohlke at the Addison, ‘Pulp Function’ at the Worcester Center for Crafts, and ‘Expanded Sculpture 2’ at 119 Gallery
Gohlke looks at nature not as something that we gaze on from a distance but as the often defiant or disappointing environment where we live.

Frank Gohlke, Grain Elevator and Lightning Flash, Lamesa, Texas (1975)

“Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke” at Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 180 Main St, Andover | April 12–July 13 | 978.749.4015

“Pulp Function” at Worcester Center for Crafts, 25 Sagamore Road, Worcester | April 17–May 26 | 508.753.8183

“Expanded Sculpture 2” at Gallery, 119 Chelmsford St, Lowell | April 8–May 3 | 978.452.8138

In the 1994 documentary Crumb, underground cartoonist Robert Crumb reveals that he used to ask friends to drive him around town so that he could snap photographs of power lines and telephone poles. He would later refer to these images to give his drawings an extra, almost subliminal grounding in reality. It was in this same spirit of vérité presentation — without editing out the ostensibly unattractive or marginal — that photographer Frank Gohlke turned his camera on the American landscape in the early 1970s, making a clear break with the tradition that prizes landscape photographs depicting astonishing natural beauty untainted by man’s hand. Gohlke’s early photographic explorations of his Wichita Falls (Texas) childhood, his images of destruction and rebuilding after a tornado struck that town in 1979, and his long-term project photographing the effects of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 are all on view in “ACCOMMODATING NATURE: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF FRANK GOHLKE,” which opens at the Addison Gallery of American Art on April 12. Gohlke looks at nature not as something that we gaze on from a distance but as the often defiant or disappointing environment where we live: grain elevators dotting the vast expanses of the Midwest; the Sudbury River in Massachusetts in the late 1980s, overgrown and threatened by pollution.

Paper, which so often serves as the humble underpinning of an artwork, steps into the spotlight in “PULP FUNCTION,” which opens at the Worcester Center for Crafts on April 17. Organized by the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton and curated by Lloyd E. Herman, founding director of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, the show presents more than 80 objects exploring creativity in paper, in media as diverse as jewelry, clothing, furniture, books, and sculpture. Works include Sylvia Seventy’s cast-paper vessels, Mia Hall’s tissue-and-paper-towel wedding dress, Long-Bin Chen’s Buddha head made from Chinese phone books, and Leslie Miller’s intricate work with cut paper.