"Transgressive Architecture"
Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley
Thursday, April 24, 6:30 pm
Sert Gallery, 3rd floor
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA
http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/BYO.html
Drinks and Dinner Provided
Ali Smith, Interplanetary Chart, 2007, Oil, acrylic on canvas, 64''x68''
Darren Foote, Flashlight #2, 2008, Poplar, 100''x7''x7''
Boston-based artist Darren Foote and LA-based Ali Smith's current exhibition at RHYS Gallery is full of playful spacial observations. Smith's vibrant explosions of oil and acrylic toy with dimensionality, while Foote's poplar sculptures defining the reach of artificial light sources make the intangible tangible.
RHYS gallery will be relocating to Los Angeles soon, so be sure to stop into the Harrison Ave location while it is still on this coast.
RHYS Gallery
Darren Foote + Ali Smith
April 03 - May 02, 2008
http://rhysgallery.com/
Toni Pepe, Untitled from the series Angle of Repose (Tablecloth with Dust), 2007, Archival Inkjet print [courtesy of the gallery]
Laura McPhee, Beaver Ponds on Fisher Creek After Wild Fire, White Cloud Mountains, Idaho, 2007, C-print [courtesy of the gallery]
Bernard Toale Gallery's current exhibition pairs the work of two artists, Toni Pepe and Laura McPhee, with strikingly different approaches to photography.
McPhee's dramatic mountains and forests are hauntingly still landscapes captured with the precise eye of a photographer's photographer. Pepe's Angle of Repose series is an idea-based collection of staged photos of women in various household environments, creating a dark and moody narrative along the lines of Cindy Sherman's art historical pieces.
You'll want to bring a McPhee home with you, but you'll still be thinking about Pepe the next day.
Laura McPhee, Two Years Later
Toni Pepe, Angle of Repose
Bernard Toale Gallery
450 Harrison Ave, Boston 02118
April 2 through May 10
Our friends J and D rank the Harvard Natural History Museum as one of their two favorite Boston destinations, along with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Dinosaur and whale bones. A hummingbird collection. The world's largest collection of Victorian glass flowers.
This Ivy League museum is the very definition of old school exhibition style: all the specimens are tightly grouped, even stacked, in front of bright monochrome backgrounds. Without any environmental context whatsoever, the viewer is free to think about the animals however they wish, which makes for a wonderfully poetic exploration. Contemporary museums go to extremes to recreate appropriate environments for their stuffed specimens and often avoid the relationships that are so interesting. It's surprisingly refreshing to focus on just one thing, not the entire context.
Darren Foote and Ali Smith are opening tonight at RHYS Gallery from 5-8pm.
RHYS Gallery
401 Harrison Avenue, Boston
Courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum [source]
Why, oh why, did it take us six months of living here before we finally got ourselves over to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum? Perhaps it's because we were biased by so many American museums with pre-1945 collections that feel as sleepy and dusty as a great-aunt's parlor (The Huntington and Norton-Simon spring to mind). Surely a museum bearing such a flowery gilded-age lady's moniker, featuring her personal collection peppered with Singer Sargents, would be as fussy and yawn-inducing as museum's come.
Please pass some humble pie — I deserve a full serving.
It's rare that Murray and I truly linger in art museums, and even rarer that we meander back to see a gallery in a museum on the same trip, just to soak it up further. Yet we spent most of the afternoon wandering around the magical ISGM, pulling back the quaint velvet curtains covering the rickety wood and glass vitrines to see handwritten letters by Dante; opening cabinet doors covered in drawings, fascinated by the terse typed sign saying "STOLEN" where one of Degas' drawings used to hang; comparing Giotto's Christ child with Botticelli's with Martini's with da Rimini's in the Long Gallery and Gothic rooms on the third floor.
And we lingered further, listening to the xylophonist of a contemporary sextet warming up before a concert in the Tapestry room, leaning over the balcony overlooking the courtyard, taking mental notes about the wall hangings curving around corners, the Italian bed-frames used as railings, the layering of patterns, textures, styles, periods.
How perfect that the ISGM has a vibrant artist-in-residence program that has featured over fifty contemporary artists, including Laura Owens, and Henrik Håkansson: this is a museum for artists.
Virtually unchanged since its origination under the careful and inventive hand of Mrs. Gardner, this museum reads more like a large-scale assemblage of art and objects than a clinical exhibition out of an art history text book. The museum invites the viewer into an intimate and homey place for contemplation, for wonder, for close observation, for shared transcendent experience. That's about as cutting edge as museums get.
Leonardo Drew, Number 122, 2007, installation, Fogg
Leonardo Drew, Number 122, 2007, installation detail, Fogg
Louise Lawler, War is Terror, 2001/2003, photograph, Fogg
East Pediment of the Temple of Aphaia (Original), Greek, c 490-475 BC, marble and Warrior's Head (Copy), synthetic marble, Sackler
The art museums at Harvard are better, in my opinion, than Boston's august *Museum of Fine Arts... and a ticket to all three is half the $17 price-tag of the big museum. The last image is from the current show at the Sackler, Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity, on view through January 20, 2008, which is the most comprehensive and educational grouping of painted reproductions of ancient sculpture I've seen.
* I'm holding out hope for the "new" MFA.
Heide Fasnacht, In Transit, 2007, Tape on wall and floor, 7' x 36' x 7'2"
At the risk of sounding vague, the first thing to know about Heide Fasnacht is that she is an artist who understands the shape of things and places. In her newest show at Bernard Toale Gallery, she takes on those ubiquitous hieroglyphics of urban highway interchanges, so familiar to anyone who has seen them from the air. In a series of drawings and one wall installation, Fasnacht prises those shapes away from much of their context to reveal the graceful symmetry and patterns, so unintentionally aesthetic: a byproduct of designs intended to keep people moving fluidly and efficiently in different directions.
While Fasnacht's drawings capture the iconic nature of these shapes, it is her installation that changes the work from bland observational urban landscape into something else entirely. Like the playful shimmer of a Bridget Riley, or the horizonless confusion of James Turrell, her optic-illusional installation makes the eye's understanding of space cunningly flip-flop: now you see the lines of the gallery wall, now you see the lines of the architectural shape on that wall. The ultimate result is that the shape of the thing itself breaks free of all boundaries and holds court as a distinct presence, demanding the viewers' full attention.
Fasnacht has made a career working at the interchange of forced perspective and real space, and her best works are the tape and contact paper wall installations which leap from corners into the viewer's perceived field of vision. Confronted with such an intense created space, the viewer if left to meditate on the shape and meaning of the illusion.
Heide Fasnacht: In Transit
Bernard Toale Gallery
Oct 3 - Nov 10, 2007
Related: Heide Fasnacht at Kent Gallery in NYC is reviewed in this month's Art in America.
Julia Hechtman, Before the Fall, 2007, (video still), 2 min. single-channel video
Another standout Boston gallery, Samson Projects is the kind of confident-cool space that sends out press releases imploring the audience to "Go Outside!" instead of checking out their new landscape show, which is titled, with ironic accuracy, simply "... a landscape show." Of course, this is no mere landscape show, but a savvy survey of the outside through the postmodern lens of 13 observant and analytical artists.
From Noriko Furunishi's mash-up of a waterfall to Dan Torop's achingly invasive Sprinkler, to Shay Kun's couch-friendly landscapes with inappropriate killer whales and rescue helicopters and the elegant Alex Katz's economic portraits of people and nature, this exhibition runs the gamut of contemporary interpretations on a very traditional theme.
Julia Hechtman's prophetic video, Before the Fall, introduces the show, and with good reason. The artist in the corner of the television screen leads the viewer through a series of natural disasters, a thematic statement that provides just the right dose of relevancy to a show that could otherwise lean too heavily on beautiful imagery. Quoting again from the gallery statement, "The release of the elements as kitsch fodder? Is it necessary to elucidate more on the decorative aspects as well as the intelligent designer/ spiritual tenet?"
The only answer: see for yourself.
...a landscape show
September 7 - October 20
Samson Projects
