Combining The Verbal And the Visual The Chandler Gallery’s salon-style show of small works combining language and image raises surprisingly large issues. Juror Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons has focused on jarring experiments in crossing disciplinary boundaries. To deepen our understanding of how combining the verbal and the visual may destabilize our construction of meaning, Campos-Pons has narrowed her selection to 56 examples, often several by a single artist. While we organize language through order and orthography, syntax and sounds, we perceptually organize and interpret visual art forms by different modes and rules. When signals from both systems of meaning present themselves, the brain tends to privilege one system of cues in order to be able to extract consistent forms of meaning. Meanwhile, the ambiguity and overlaps from both worlds can confuse or trick us. The works in … [Read more...] about Word + Image
Issue Articles
Aithan Shapira
A Worldly Voice With a Local Flavor Art and travel are often woven together. Travel informs art and process; art prompts and guides exploration. But the results aren’t always as stunning as they are for Aithan Shapira. “Painting was my compass, always,” he confesses. And a peripatetic compass it was, guiding Shapira from Boston to Gloucester, and on to England, Mexico, Israel and an aboriginal community in Australia. How lucky we are that the same compass led Shapira back to Boston as an artist and educator. Shapira’s first solo show at Adelson Gallery is a joyful feast of architecture, light and nature. His finely developed voice rings crisply through paint and concrete; it nods to the abstract natural landscapes of mentor John Walker, it’s infused with the palette of the Australian aboriginal artists (Rembrandt’s palette too, if you’re keeping track), and it’s executed with … [Read more...] about Aithan Shapira
What Remains at CoSo
Zanger and Hamil Talman Go Deep Here are two women with their sleeves rolled up. I’m in Ginny Zanger’s studio in Jamaica Plain, Mass., watching and listening as she shows me the works she has selected for her upcoming two-woman exhibit at Boston’s Copley Society of Art: “What Remains.” Technique is important when attempting to import, for a gallery girded with tradition and safely above sea level — for now — just some of the freshness, luxuriant variety and sheer unpredictability, not to mention wetness, a diver encounters underwater. As I listen and look, sometimes with new eyes, sometimes with eyes scrambling to sort out information from a slow brain, Zanger’s partner in their upcoming exhibit, Donna Hamil Talman, chimes in to emphasize one of the multiple steps in the transit from life to art. Talman has navigated the challenges and excitement of this journey before, … [Read more...] about What Remains at CoSo
Stereotype
International Artists Explore Font as Art The momentous emergence of the alphabet and subsequent typeface design endowed mankind with a pivotal, durable form of communication. The current exhibition, “StereoType — New Directions in Typography,” sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects (BSA), demonstrates that utilitarian fonts, renascent in the digital age, are a vast springboard for resourceful thinking, yielding multifaceted visual expressions, including one rooted in profound scientific research. Font as art? One only needs to recall when this threshold was first crossed by pop artist Robert Indiana, whose “Love” sculpture of four red, upper-case letters arranged in a square with the “O” tilted was first displayed 45 years ago in 1970 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The design initially appeared on a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card in 1964, and later in 1973, when … [Read more...] about Stereotype
Knitting Together The Urban Fabric
The Story of Janet Echelman's Greenway Aerial Installation World-renowned artist Janet Echelman is creating an aerial installation for Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway to be unveiled on May 11, 2015. Her iconic works of art have been exhibited internationally, but never before on the East Coast. Her current Greenway project promises to place Boston on the map as a destination for world-class public art. Echelman’s sculptures were recently ranked No. 1 on Oprah Winfrey’s “List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!” The one that is coming to Boston is made from over 100 miles of rope and 542,500 knots, and will suspend over one of the busiest roads ever involved in one of her installations. At 365 feet, it will be installed at a higher altitude than any other work, and is designed to withstand the strongest wind gusts at 105 mph. The sculpture weighs approximately one ton, the longest … [Read more...] about Knitting Together The Urban Fabric
Joan Jonas’ Multimedia Dream World
Driving Toward Complexity and Control Far from being “random” events, dreams and their symbolic features are, Sigmund Freud maintained, overdetermined from multiple sources and masked in daily experience. They function to bind anxiety, trauma and conflict. Like a dream, a work of art is fruitful when it funnels many converging forces, allowing it to bear not one interpretation but many. The frenzy of stimuli in Joan Jonas’ later multimedia spectacles belies the simplicity of her constrained early works. But as we discern the integrity of even her over-saturated productions, we come to admire her intelligence, ambition and passion. This exhibition at MIT’s Bakalar Gallery presents black-and-white performance videos by Jonas from the mid-1970s, color videos from the ’80s and one video created for Documenta XI shortly after the attacks of September 11. The intermediate works, though … [Read more...] about Joan Jonas’ Multimedia Dream World