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The rippling surface of water in a small steel structure catches and reflects fragments of light and color, casting it onto the surrounding walls and ceiling. These reflections are the result of three video monitors installed in a row several feet above the metal trough, their screens parallel to the water’s surface. The videos, which show the artist Shigeko Kubota swimming through a body of water, are silent, so all that can be heard is the faint hum from the water pump itself. This work, titled River (1979-81), is the manifestation of…
Just as we get pummeled with snow, there’s no better time to update our preview of spring exhibitions. Many of these are shows that just opened and we hope to catch, as well as a few upcoming events on our radar. — BRS editorial team THURSDAY, MARCH 15 Jeffrey Gibson: Performance 6:30 pm Tufts University Art Galleries Included in the current exhibition A Decolonial Atlas, Jeffrey Gibson is a multidisciplinary artist who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half Cherokee. Gibson will debut, “Don’t Make Me Over,”…
Last year, Lucas Spivey parked his vintage Shasta camper on the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza, unfurled the awning, positioned a flamingo lawn ornament, and invited artists of all types inside to discuss business. As the BCA’s public art resident, he offered Mobile Incubator as a connection between the local culture and business sectors through podcasts with entrepreneurs and free advice sessions for artists. Currently, Spivey’s work is back at the BCA as curator of Culture Hustlers: Artists Minding Their Business at the Mills Gallery in an unusual exhibition that explores…
Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech, the exhibition at Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Druker Design Gallery, attempts to map a sprawling field of experimentation from a youngish generation within the discipline of architecture. It uses three diagrams based on a “semiotic square” schema to sort all the images and models in the exhibition into categories, connecting them thematically with oppositional axes to reveal relationships and affinities. Two of the diagrams show techniques of the observer and of the author, respectively: Flat Affects to Jouissance, and Actual Architecture to Virtual Architecture—virtual being the only…
HARD: Subversive Representation, a group show on view at UMass Boston’s University Hall Gallery, mounts a bold critique of gendered systems of representation. Organized by Gallery Curator Sam Toabe, HARD is the companion to SOFT, a project at Sübsamsøn in 2015 that interrogated the distinction of fiber art as feminine by showing a group of men working with fibrous materials. Extending the straightforward curatorial thesis of SOFT, the artists in HARD are all women, although their work does not share the formal or material connections of SOFT. Instead, the artists in HARD…
One goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs. – Plato, Symposium, 211c We all need to transcend sometimes. The boring. The chaotic. The painful. Transcending the finite has often been thought of as a purpose — even the main purpose — of art and beauty. Evocations by Greg Lookerse gives us a renewed opportunity, which is becoming increasingly uncommon, to explore that idea. That is a bold concept in an age regularly celebrating the banal. Yet ancient and contemporary…
The Godine Family Gallery is a student-run exhibition and project space in the Studio for Interrelated Media Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. The small, square space houses Perpetual Collapse, work from a selection of seven artists arranged like furniture in a casual room, where themes, colors, and shapes echo one another. From the start, it is apparent that the haphazard arrangement sets up a challenge for the viewer to connect these disparate works. True to its title, the exhibition format seems “collapsed” here, leaving pieces scattered on the floor…
Bryan Christie’s solo exhibition, Every Angel is Terror, offers tangible evidence that the categories we create for the sake of language—art, science, religion, poetry—dissolve at a point of convergence. On view at Matter & Light, this exhibition grasps at what is sought out by scientific inquiry and spiritual exploration alike: the unseen, unknown, and unnamable. No less artist than alchemist, Christie combines his knowledge of digital illustration, human biology, spirituality, and art practice into works that bring the immaterial into the material realm. At first, Every Angel is Terror seems like a…