Artscope Magazine: January/February 2007

Super Vision

Gary Duehr

The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston
100 Northern Avenue

Through April 29

Perched at the edge of the harbor like a giant Polaroid SX-70 camera, as if it's about to take a picture of the Tobin Bridge in the distance, the new Institute for Contemporary Art's daring exterior promises more than the inaugural exhibition, "Super Vision," delivers.

A survey of how technology has changed ways of seeing, at first glance the show feels familiar. A Harold Edgerton bullet splitting an apple? Check. A Tony Oursler eyeball-video installation, with grainy projections on ping-pong ball-like spheres? Check. A Gerhard Richter aerial painting with slashes of black and gray? Check. An Andreas Gursky montage photo, a Jeff Koons bunny (a Jeff Koons bunny? still figuring out how that one snuck in under the subtheme "Pleasure/Threat"), an Ed Ruscha technicolor mountain stamped with big block letters? Check, check and check. In fact, even in this medium-sized exhibition, there are actually two Gursky's and two Koons's.

But keep looking, inside the skylit galleries on the top story with their sleek, polished concrete floors, and the bolder half of "Super Vision" reveals itself.

Fashion Show: Paris Collections 2006

William Corbett

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts

465 Huntington Avenue

Through March 18

The MFA's "Fashion Show" is a documentary presenting the work 10 designers showed in Paris earlier this year. For those who follow fashion what is on view is already dated. This will not diminish the pleasure of most viewers, but it does remind us that what we're seeing is not art. Fashion may be an art in the way fielding shortstop, baking bread or training dogs is, but it is a trade or craft. Beauty results, but fashion is soon history, lifeless if not worn, which may be why New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art keeps its fashion collection in the basement.

Fashion Photography

William Corbett

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts

465 Huntington Avenue

Through March 25

This show complements "Fashion Show: Paris Collections 2006." It is of interest as a show of photographs rather than a show of fashion photography. The top images cannot be contained within the ghetto of "Vogue" and "Harper's Bazaar." Yes, the usual suspects are here but Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Baron Adolf de Mayer, Cecil Beaton, Hiro, Helmut Newton and MFA franchise Herb Ritts do not dominate. Well, the MFA does use a bland Ritts for its poster, but the action in this show is elsewhere.

William Klein's close-up of a veiled model letting industrial strength smoke curl from her mouth is a new take on a pose all the rage in late 1940s and early 1950s fashion photography. The British John Goodman's portrait "Yael/Blue" (2003) shows Yael, a favorite model of his, in a royal blue evening dress wearing royal blue lipstick and royal blue marcelled hair. Perhaps Goodman had in mind some sort of homage to Yves Klein. Guy Bourdin's image of a hotel corridor at night plays off shoes to be polished left outside room doors. One of them is an oversize yellow woman's high-heeled shoe. Fashion is perfect for such jokes and they have been sprinkled through this show.

Among the best in show is Louis Faure's "Lingerie" (1962) in which the model is turned three quarters away from the viewer.

Fashioning an Interview: artscope's James Foritano talks with MFA Director Malcolm Rogers

James Foritano

If fashion is "NOW!" I'm so "then." So I decided to telephone Dr. Malcolm Rogers, director of Boston's venerable Museum of Fine Arts and ask him for some guidance as to which end was up and which pathway would lead, even me, "in." After all, I had grown up in a Boston which considered "fashion" a New York affectation and which christened the MFA "The Old Grey Lady" at least partly out of defiance of the world, and no little affection.

Sensing my need to feel that I was not hopeless, he counseled me to walk directly to the runway and absorb the ingenious lines and wonderful colors of the very best "haute couture."

Jeff Brouws: Approaching Nowhere

Catherine LaFerriere

Robert Klein Gallery
38 Newbury Street

Fourth Floor

Boston

January 5 through March 17

Simone de Beauvior once noted, "The average American spends a lot of his leisure time cruising the highway - that's why the gas stations, roads, motels and remote inns are American through and through." Photographer Jeff Brouws takes de Beauvior to heart in "Approaching Nowhere" by bursting into a medley of roadside imagery, then veering into a wasteland of franchised and discarded American landscape. But what could make for a relentlessly discouraging exhibit is salvaged by Brouws' genuine distress about the state of the affairs and his salute to small victories of the American everyman over corporate interests.

Martin Schoeller: Big Heads

George Gerard

and Works by Amy Chan

Bernard Toale Gallery
450 Harrison Avenue

Boston

January 4 through February 17

After previewing the work of Martin Schoeller from the series "Big Heads" for his exhibition at Bernard Toale Gallery, I spent some time looking in the mirror trying to capture in myself what his portraiture carries. "Big Heads" is a seven-year collection of large-scale analog photographs featuring celebrity and non-celebrity faces.

Schoeller, who is a staff photographer for "The New Yorker," trained at the Dusseldorf Academy in Germany. Arriving in New York City in 1990s, he established himself photographing celebrities for various magazines, including "Rolling Stone," the "New York Times Magazine," and "The New Yorker." Along the way, he managed to compile shots of his subjects, in both color and black and white, and in 1998 produced "Big Heads."

The first thing about the portraits that brings you to attention is the celebrity faces.

WPA Paintings Exhibition

Leon Nigrosh

Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center Museum
Union Station

2 Washington Square

Worcester, Massachusetts

Through May 19

He never made it onto Mount Rushmore, but his fifth cousin Teddy did. He did have a highway in New York City named after him. He was wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life after losing a bout with polio at age 39. He was the only U.S. president to serve four consecutive terms in office. And the Japanese thought they had intimidated him with their Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. That's right, he's Franklin Delano Roosevelt (better known as FDR) who was the 32nd president of the United States. But, did you know that there is a museum solely dedicated to him, his family, and career right inside the magnificently restored Union Station in Worcester, Massachusetts?

While he will always be remembered for standing up to Japan, his "New Deal," and the development of the Social Security program, FDR also instituted the Works Projects Administration (later known as the Works Progress Administration) in an effort to dig more than 20 million Americans out of the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Part of that program was called the Federal Art Project, which encouraged - and underwrote - U.S. photographers, sculptors, writers, and painters to depict the courage of the American people during those trying times. Which brings us to the current exhibition at the FDR Center.

From Here to There: Works by Kylikki Talp, Scott Chasse and Laurie Carman

George Gerard

Locco Ritoro
450 Harrison Avenue

Storefront 37

Boston

January 5 through February 24

The process of unity through disjointed action has been a topic that persists in art. From pointillism to collage, many techniques examine unconnected systems between individual parts of a completed work. The selection shown in "From Here to There" all represent this examination whether intentionally, or by a reversal of the examination process.

Central to the exhibition are the paintings of Kylikki Talp. Talp comes from Estonia, with a background in painting fostered both in Estonia at the Tallinn Art University and in the United States, at the Rhode Island School of Design. Talp's technique breaks down a completed image, working to create and destroy, finally coming to rest on a recreation that expresses both the confusion of the inner self and its relation to its carrier (the body). When placed in a context, the body too has a container (the house). Talp uses this multi-layering in both her technique and her subject matter. Representatively then, Talp's work is a perfect choice for this show; the diffusion of the layers gives way to unity and depth.

Robert C. Jackson: A Quest for Immortality

Catherine LaFerriere

Arden Gallery
129 Newbury Street

Boston

January 3 through 30

Any student of world cultures will testify the apple is one of the oldest symbols around. The fruit single-handedly instigated the eviction of mankind from paradise, provoked a petty fight amongst three pretty goddesses (and thus the Trojan War), and forced a princess into a deep sleep until a prince happened upon her coffin. Today Robert C. Jackson joins the ranks of artists whose pathetic fallacy is dedicated to the multitalented fruit.

In this lighthearted ode to color and composition, Jackson's apples dominate. They indulge in immoral activity (think nips of liquor and cigarettes), stage a rescue effort for a friend in flames atop a stack of soda cartons, and war with plastic drink swords. Jackson's apples even make time for hot air ballooning in his breezy and cheerful "Up and Away." The apples in Jackson's character driven narratives mimic human adventure with such self-assurance it's easy to forget you're looking at fruit.

Cynthia Atwood: Transparent Couture and Other Pleasures

James Foritano

Trustman Gallery
Simmons College

300 The Fenway

Boston

February 5 through March 2

The subtle legerdemain of Louise Bourgeois spanning a century with meticulous industry and strenuous imagination; the iconoclasm of Judy Chicago and her crew of art students building Woman House out of demolished cultural platitudes in the early '70s, in Hollywood - heart of the beast; the flip intensity of the Surrealists attacking with their multifarious "happenings" and manifestoes and disorienting art the monstrosity of bourgeois reasoning which led to the cataclysm of World War 1. All these feed into the highly individual art of hard/soft sculpture which Cynthia Atwood creates from her redoubt in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

They creep, they crawl, they prance, they droop, they dance. And just when you think they've exhausted their repertoire of locomotive possibilities, they shake a limb you've never seen before, or withdraw into the quietude of piously folded hands.

Through the Lens: Blue Man Group Vortex grand prize winner Ryuji Suzuki

Brian Goslow

Most photographers begin their careers with inspiration from the past. Not Ryuji Suzuki, who bought his first camera when he came to the United States in 1995 so he could send travel pictures home to family and friends in Sendai, Japan. "In the first roll, I started taking picture of atypical scenes," said Suzuki. "I asked myself, 'Why do I have to take these pictures that other people have taken?'"

The 32-year-old Suzuki recently won the $2500 grand prize in the 18+ Age Group of the Blue Man Group's annual juried "Vortex" art competition. The winning work, "Crosstalk," a silver-gelatin print toned in polysulfide and selenium, will be exhibited at the Charles Playhouse through October 2007. It was taken in Central Square on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge.

"(Through the photograph) I'm expressing that pay phones are things that people don't care about any more," Suzuki said. "They're inanimate devices that were once part of our everyday lives. I found it interesting that I could use those things completely differently."

356: AIGA Annual Design Competition 27 Exhibition

Chet Williamson

The Gallery at Mount Ida College
777 Dedham Street

Newton, MA

January 30 through March 4, 2007

Each year the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) presents a challenge to the best and brightest designers in the nation. The result is an award-winning annual traveling exhibition that makes its first stop at the Gallery at Mount Ida Gallery College.

"It's interesting, what's on the wall is what you get in the mail, what you read in newspapers, look at in magazines and see on television," Mt. Ida gallery director Kathleen Driscoll said. "It's about design and any industry you can think of is represented."

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child (In Context)

Leon Nigrosh

Worcester Art Museum
55 Salisbury Street

Worcester, Massachusetts

Through February 27, 2007

American artist Louise Bourgeois, referred to by some as "the oldest of young artists," at age 95 has achieved so many accomplishments, such as representing the United States in the 1993 Venice Biennale, that her biography alone would fill this article. In her earlier days as an artist she took hammer and chisel to marble, did bronze casting, carved and painted wood, and created monstrous, walk-through steel spiders - her most recent shown in Rockefeller Center in 2001.

Lately, however, she has returned to her roots, stitching fabric. At the age of 12, while still living in France, Bourgeois started helping her mother in the family business of restoring Medieval and Renaissance tapestries. The current exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum is small: two wall works and five freestanding pieces. But give yourself plenty of time to examine each presentation, because not only are they intricately produced, they are rife with psychological, social, and feminist implications.

Beyond the Borders - Old Bones in a New Glass House: The Amherst College Museum of Natural History

Greg Morell

Newly reopened
"Visionary Anatomies"

Mead Art Museum

Amherst College

January 6 through March 18

Amherst College has reinvented the concept of a small Museum of Natural History. The former Pratt Museum that was housed in a vintage 1883 gymnasium is now the new Amherst College Museum of Natural History. The move has transformed an eclectic collection of bones and artifacts intimating a peculiar turn of the century archeological perspective into a brilliantly housed museum and research center.

The funky charm of the old museum that gave one the impression of trespassing in the curio cabinet of the grandfather of Indiana Jones is gone, replaced by a brilliantly designed state of the art complex of polished stone and glass. This exploratorium of geologic gems, mastodons and skeletal tableaus is a small crystal palace of science.

North Bennett Street School: An Education in Craftsmanship

Brian Goslow

39 North Bennett Street
Boston

There are few work areas as inspirational as the fourth floor workshop of North Bennet Street School where cabinet and furniture program student James Watriss works in the shadows of the Old North Church. Equally as breathtaking is the piano technology room where 1929 Vose & Sons and 1885-1889 Steinway and Sons pianos are being refurbished one careful carving at a time. The scenes are repeated throughout the 19th century brick building, where NBSS students intensely focus on their life's chosen mission, be it bookbinding, locksmithing, jewelry making and repair, carpentry or craftsmanship.

"Our goal is to train people in crafts and trades to make a living," said Director of Admissions Robert Delaney. "Because we're accredited, they have to have a likelihood of succeeding in finding a job after graduation." Applicants come from around the world. Approximately 150 to 155 full-time students - the youngest is 18 with the oldest in their late 60s - are enrolled in one- to three-year programs with a maximum class size of 12. Part time and short-term sessions are offered as well. Many NBSS instructors graduated from the classes they teach.

Beyond the Border - Music of the Spheres and Rhythms of the Earth: Sculpture by Evelyn Clowes, Jonathan Clowes, and John Hughes

Paula Melton

Brattleboro Museum and Art Center
10 Vernon Street

Brattleboro, Vermont

Through March 4

"Music of the Spheres and Rhythms of the Earth" brings two stirring bodies of sculptural work into harmonious conversation. Balancing the work of Evelyn and Jonathan Clowes with that of John Hughes, this intelligently designed exhibit grounds the viewer while drawing the gaze upward, calling to mind the relationship between the space we inhabit and the celestial bodies that have given humans physical and spiritual direction for all of history.

John Hughes contributes the "Rhythms of the Earth" half of the show, though one of the many joyful ironies of this exhibit is that his forms tend to suggest instruments - musical, astronomical and nautical. In fact, the first piece to catch the eye is a large one-stringed instrument "(Untitled 1991)." This sculpture is typical of Hughes' work in its scale, its stubborn refusal of a title, its formidably long media list, its shapely, polished beauty and the curious tilt that causes constant reconsideration of the work's center of gravity. Its recognizable shape ("representational" is not strictly the word, because the piece can be tuned and played) makes it atypical. But, like Hughes' other works, its form evokes many possible things - a boat, a cello, and a human body - without quite being any of them.

Letter from Provincetown: Anne MacAdam

Brian Goslow

Provincetown summers have been captured and interpreted by endless painters and photographers. Alas, much like the exodus of the season, few remain to capture the beauty that exists the rest of the year as well. Last fall, inspired by her "The Dunes in Winter" paintings, artscope magazine asked Anne MacAdam to discuss the difference in painting the landscape of the outer Cape during the cold harshness of winter:

I am working to realize a sense of authenticity in my paintings. Authenticity in experience; in an emotional connection to the subject; to convey a sense of Truth.

Theater - See What I Wanna See

Chet Williamson

Lyric Stage Company of Boston
140 Clarendon Street

January 5 through February 3

In scoring the music for "See What I Wanna See," composer Michael John LaChiusa said he wanted a kind of "world-music-mongrelism." He effectively accomplishes this by mixing elements of jazz -particularly the emotionally dark and jarring music heard in classic noir films such as "Double Indemnity," composed by Miklos Rozsa - with traditional Japanese folk music.

"I love the jazz and early rock 'n' roll of that era,"_ LaChiusa said. "Also the character of New York. The idea of shadow and light and music is fascinating to me. All those things feed into it."

Race, Class, Gender does not equal Character

Roanna Forman

The Revolving Museum
22 Shattuck Street

Lowell, MA

Through February 4

For 22 years, Revolving Museum director Jerry Back has been committed to fostering individual, and community, growth through the transformative power of creative expression - which is exactly what's happening in "Race, Class, Gender." These 32 works, part of a recent larger exhibition at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, belong in the Revolving Museum, whose mission is one with the AVAM catalogue's observation that "the lines between art and activism are often admirably blurred." The works, in mediums as wide-ranging as wood, bottle caps, pipe cleaners, and bed sheets, reflect the raw power of the artists, whose message overrode their improvised mediums. In fact, it was bound up in them. Being poor, you use what you have at hand.

GOVERnOR DEVAL PATRiCK AnD ThE CREATiVE ECOnOMy: Massachusetts's cultural organizations have their say

Brian Goslow

During Deval Patrick's November 8 acceptance speech, the then-Massachusetts Governor-elect stated, "We have a mandate ... to help the creative economy flourish." Along with new Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray, he quickly acted on those words by holding four Patrick/Murray Transition Team community meetings to solicit public opinion on the creative economy at the Worcester Art Museum, Mass College of Art, Cape Cod Community College, and the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield; suggestions were also gathered through the mail and the transition team's website and blog.

Can a Theater Save a City?: Pittsfield's Colonial Theatre

Greg Morell

The Colonial Theatre is much more than a fabulous theater saved from the wrecking ball. It is the miracle of Pittsfield, but the question is, can it save the city? The Colonial is a jewel box, a palace and temple to the arts, lovingly restored to its bygone opulent glory, but newly enhanced by the technology and comforts of a fine modern theater.

artscope capsule preview: The Fine Arts Center Galleries, University of Rhode Island

Chet Williamson

105 Upper College Road, Kingston, describes itself as an active "kunsthalle," a German expression that generally means art center. Comprised of three public exhibition areas, the Galleries at URI annually present a changing program of contemporary art to stimulate the understanding and interpretation of art in its evolving visual expressions. LOOKING AT THE LAND, WATER | LAND | SKY | LINEN | STEEL | STONE, a focused survey of works by Merrill Wagner, tracking the fluid relationship between abstraction and representation, opens on January 23 and runs through March 11. Visit uri.edu/artgalleries.

artscope capsule preview: Williams College Museum of Art

Chet Williamson

One of the premiere college art museums in the country, the Williams College Museum of Art, 15 Lawrence Hall Drive, Williamstown, MA houses 12,000 works spanning the history of art and world cultures. "Andy Warhol's Early Years: Works from the Collection of the Williams College Museum of Art," based on a collection of Warhol material gifted to the museum in 2005, opens on February 10 and runs through June 10. With an emphasis on works on paper, the collection includes rare artist books, prints and drawings, working "dummies" for "Interview" magazine, Polaroid portraits of his friends, and much more. Vivian Patterson is the show's curator. Visit wcma.org.

artscope capsule preview: The Griffin Museum of Photography

Chet Williamson

67 Shore Road, Winchester, MA features both well-known and emerging photographers. "The Days After," images by Johannes Hepp, who has traveled the world capturing images of places ravaged by terror, and "Constantine Manos' The Magic Moment Workshop Exhibit" are on view through February 4. "Rough Beauty," images by Dave Anderson that explore the character and burden of Vidor, Texas, reviled for its history of Klu Klux Klan activities, can be seen in the Emerging Artist Gallery from February 15 to April 15. Visit griffinmuseum.org.

artscope capsule preview: Whitney Arts Works

Chet Williamson

45 York Street, Portland, Maine is full-service art facility offering art storage, gallery space and other art-related services. Its 2007 season kicks off with sculptures referencing "rap, reductionisms, fast-food rants and recycled rhythms from Coney Island carousels" by Cliff Baldwin and patterned formalist abstractions by Patrick O'Rourke from January 10 through February 10. "Still," a group show featuring the work of Robert Diamante, Wilson Jay Ong and Debra Yoo follows from February 14 through March 24. Visit whitneyartworks.com.

artscope capsule preview: Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre

Chet Williamson

172 Exchange Street, Pawtucket, Rhode Island bills itself as a theatre that presents plays of substance and distinction. As the cornerstone of the Arts Exchange at the Pawtucket Armory, The Gamm seeks to engage and enrich the community through affordable entertainment and educational programming. From January 25 through February 25, they will present a unique theatrical experience called "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," which features four one-act plays by three masters of the modern theater including: "A Hand Witch of the Second Stage" by Peter Barnes, "One for the Road" by Harold Pinter, "Press Conference" by Harold Pinter and "Catastrophe" by Samuel Beckett (please note, plays and dates are subject to change). Visit gammtheatre.org.