By James Foritano MEDFORD, MA – Ken Gonzales-Day’s “Profiled” exhibition at Tufts University’s Koppelman Gallery is a show you don’t just drop into. Gonzales-Day, like many art photographers, has a talent for capturing his subjects in arresting moments. He takes great care with lighting, positioning, equipment and technique. And yet, his talent, when all is explained, is still both arresting and deeply baffling. The mystery of these portraits is that, as lively as they are, the subjects “profiled” are definitely not and have never been alive. In this project, Los Angeles based artist and art historian, Ken Gonzales-Day has rifled through the storerooms of such well-established museums as the J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, among others, both foreign and domestic, to haul out and dust off mostly busts but occasional full length figures of … [Read more...] about Ken Gonzales-Day: Profiled at the Koppelman Gallery
Artscope Online
Going Places at Albright Art Gallery
By Rosemary Chandler CONCORD, MA- Albright Art Gallery is looking to mix things up in Concord, a small town rich with American history and tradition. With its latest exhibition, “GOING PLACES,” it has done exactly that. Featuring the work of Raphael Griswold, a New England native who just returned from two years abroad in Spain, “GOING PLACES” is a unique exhibition that allows visitors to view the world through Griswold’s eyes. The exhibition is a collection of landscapes executed in varied media. Through a combination of painting, film and photography, visitors are removed from the gallery space and immersed in the small segment of the world represented by each work, what Griswold calls artobjects. The latitude and longitude of each destination are listed in the exhibition guide, and from these numbers the visitor is able to determine the real distance between the landscapes, which … [Read more...] about Going Places at Albright Art Gallery
New Happenings at the New Art Center in Newton
by Sara Farizan NEWTONVILLE-Were there no signs outside to indicate otherwise, one might assume the New Art Center in Newton was a church with a congregation including curious children, emerging artists and enthusiastic aficionados. But since the late 70's, the non-profit New Art Center has been more than a suburban community art center and finds itself as a major contender in cutting edge, mixed media gallery exhibitions. Case in point, not many community art centers would have a show devoted to Heavy Metal, where skulls and grim reapers reside in the main gallery. "We Still See the Black" will be in the main gallery until October 14th featuring artists who draw inspiration from Heavy Metal album art, song lyrics and the sub-culture that amps up all kinds of emotions. Dark, gothic and gorgeous, many of the pieces are visceral, violent, melancholy and embody Heavy Metal so perfectly … [Read more...] about New Happenings at the New Art Center in Newton
Smooth and Smoky at Vessels Gallery, Boston
By James Foritano It’s so important when a lecture is just over your head that there are pictures. Every time curator Judith Motzkin’s words sailed beyond my reach, I looked around at the works of the ten potters represented in this month-long show at Vessels and understood that she was talking about Romance. Not the small potatoes served up in cinema potboilers, where the gems are mostly ersatz and the heroes so muscle-bound that a daily walk to the gym is epic. No. Here are real pearls. Behind hand-polished surfaces, evanescent traces of combustible minerals and salts dance mystic skeins of color and form. The potters represented in “Smooth and Smoky” seek to re-discover the early days of pottery, when clay was baked in open fires without the decoration of glaze. The days when utility and simplicity were key concepts; but when, being human, potters worth their salt evolved signature … [Read more...] about Smooth and Smoky at Vessels Gallery, Boston
Irene Koronas: Odd Little Books and Written Landscapes
At the O’Neill Branch of the Cambridge Public Library by James Foritano CAMBRIDGE - Thank goodness for the nooks and corners of neighborhood branch libraries which, like the O’Neill, give shelter to local artists. This September, Irene Koronas, a member of the North Cambridge Artists Association (NOCA), holds forth with a solo show arrayed behind glass-enclosed shelves, push-pin friendly walls of the O’Neill’s vestibule, just steps from Mass. Ave. and Porter Square. It’s a quiet vision, but also relentless and restless. Colored marks that can only be identified as “squiggles” repeat endless tight coils; boomerang-shaped vectors face left and right, climbing in seething counterpoint towards a horizon just inches below the top of their rectangular paper fields — where they become fainter, but just as relentlessly themselves. I almost typed “feel” instead of “field,” since these marks … [Read more...] about Irene Koronas: Odd Little Books and Written Landscapes
Visiting Italy: Venice, Rome, Florence…
by James Foritano (artscope magazine’s one-of-a-kind art reviewer James Foritano recently visited Italy with his wife, Maddy; he kindly shares his memoir of the journey here) When my sister and I were children, we delighted in assembling in the family room where our father would set up a folding screen and projector, and our mother would draw the curtains. Then we’d watch ourselves living as large as the American 1950s would permit, giggling and pointing at people we thought we knew cavorting in more vivid colors and stranger poses than we’d noticed when we were embedded, pell-mell, in full-throttle action. I didn’t realize when my wife, Madeleine, and I headed for Italy last month that we’d be re-experiencing that inside/outside feeling of being both embedded in swirling action and, at once, distant observers. But we did. I had explained to my skeptical but resigned traveling … [Read more...] about Visiting Italy: Venice, Rome, Florence…