Unless doctored, a photograph records without bias. Unlike a painting or a novel, the unfavorable cannot be hidden away: what is captured is evident. Whole systems of operation can be gleaned, if one is willing to look honestly. Through January 8, at Brandeis University’s Kniznick Gallery in the Women’s Studies Research Center, a showing of photographs by C. Rose Smith weaves a story of what cannot be hidden. “A Silent Rage” is comprised of 12 photographs, in which Smith — through carefully posed and captured images — charts the transatlantic cotton trade that propped up much of the American economy in its first 100-odd years. “Serving as a conduit for the oppressed, my self-assertion reimagines and reinserts their existence in spaces where they were once unauthorized,” Smith said in their artist statement. In a supple and rich black-and-white, Smith graces the interiors of southern … [Read more...] about THE QUIET THAT BURNS

There is kinetic energy that arises when two artists join in a many-faceted relationship. In the case of William Hays and Nina Rossi of Turners Falls, Massachusetts, it is both cosmic and pedestrian. The artists have been married for five years, and the interchange and self-knowledge attained through a wholistic partnership is almost indulgent; it is a precious balance of domestic collaboration and individual art practice that forges the day forward, rising tides of inspiration from the other and respect for the silence that leads to the artmaking. The two artists’ processes and works could not be more polar. Rossi bullets down a rabbit hole of images, ideas, community participation and differentiated media; her works stem from an almost medusa-like process, always in motion and captured from different sources. Hays’ printmaking is process-oriented, introspective and methodical. He … [Read more...] about Kenetic Energies Etc Etc

DaNice D. Marshall never intended to become a painter. For most of her life, she was a writer, a woman who lived within language, shaping stories with rhythm, cadence and the intimacy of thought. Writing had always been her home, her compass, her way of mapping both the inner and outer worlds. Then silence arrived. A severe vascular disease altered the course of her life completely, gradually eroding her hearing and, with it, her ability to concentrate long enough to write. The sentences that had once come effortlessly began to dissolve into silence, and for the first time, the woman who had always found her voice through words was left without one. What could have marked an ending instead became a transformation. During recovery, Marshall reached for paint, not with any grand ambition, but to fill the silence. The colors became her new language, a visual form of storytelling that … [Read more...] about WHEN SILENCE BECAME COLOR

Sometimes we love what artists create because of its aesthetic beauty, sometimes its abstractions intrigue us with their ambiguity or sometimes its concepts message us, sometimes it catches hold of atime, place or memory. Other art, like Frances Bacon’s paintings, or the works of Egon Schiele or social realists like Bernece Berkman examine the human condition. Though she categorizes herself as a figurative expressionist, Laura Shabott’s work blends a bit of all these templates. Shabott herself is a life force and that force expresses itself in her originality, now in “You Only Get One Body,” an exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art (CCMOA). “The whole show really is about drawing and painting the figure from life,” she explained. “When you work with different models they are all very unique — not just physically but energetically, and each model brings out a different kind of … [Read more...] about ONE BODY INFINITE MOTION