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Marta Kaemmer’s exhibition Pull It Together, at Musa Collective, paradoxically proposes synthesis through her innate ability to pull things apart. Her parts-to-whole process examines relationship and contingency, variability, invention, and transformation. Her intention is always to open a space for possibility. Kaemmer’s materials and techniques are many, as are her art historical strategies. Domestic craft, textiles, knitting, pattern, and decoration—the familial, soft, flexible, and variable—conspire with the fundamentals of painting and the language of abstraction: targets, stripes, stains, props, the geometric and gestural, vertical and assertive. Restless experimenting yields components such as…

LGBTQIA terms have always been complicated for me, primarily because their meaning and usage can change over time (both on a personal level and in the larger LGBTQIA community). And, some terms conflate gender and sexuality. Thankfully, new terms emerge at a rapid speed, so there is always the opportunity for a more tailored fit. Of course, one could choose to not “label” themselves, but despite my complicated relationship with LGBTQIA terms, I’ve found them helpful in seeking out a community. Over the years I’ve used gay, dyke, transgender (trans), genderqueer, queer…

Anna Kunz’s Venus harbors classical ambitions—not only in its name’s obvious mythological reference but in its sweeping aspirations toward spatial, painterly beauty. It was apropos then that during my visit to Providence College’s Reilly Gallery, a band recital could be overheard from the adjacent auditorium. The swell and crescendo of the instruments synchronized with the exhibit’s vortex of a centerpiece: a large video projection on the wall that pushes viewers into a chromatic tunnel of fabric folds. “Explain why my mattress/Feels so hard, and the bedclothes will never stay in place?” wonders a…

Included in the exhibition Playtime at the Peabody Essex Museum is a piece by Cory Arcangel where he manipulates the classic old-school Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. A TV monitor shows Mario stranded on a block surrounded by blue sky. If Mario moves, he falls to his death. Arcangel has hacked the game to render it unplayable, and the title Totally Fucked says it all. Walking through Playtime during a raucous preview party full of teenagers, many in anime-inspired cosplay outfits, I thought about how art purists bemoan the fact that the…

Things We Said Today, Joanne Greenbaum’s show of paintings, drawings and sculptures flirts with a see-saw fulcrum point where a work — whether painting or clay — just comes together, fresh with agency. The exhibition, curated by director and chief curator Dina Deitsch, spans the Anderson Auditorium and the Grossman Gallery at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. The abstract paintings in the Anderson Auditorium, all untitled, are ultimately nothing if not self-portraits, of a kind. They reveal Greenbaum’s compulsive drawing practice, writ large on the heroic scale…

Photographer Nicholas Nixon’s exhibition, Persistence of Vision, centers around one of his most renowned series. The Brown Sisters began with an accidental discovery, not in the way of technique, but by capturing an image that proved worthy of recreating yearly for over forty years. Nixon describes making the first Brown Sisters picture in 1975 while feeling “on edge” around his now-wife’s family. He asked his subjects — his wife, Bebe and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi, and Laurie — to pose however they liked. “This day was just really, really, really hot,”…

The new year brought a story that seemed to be a long time coming. A group of Facebook architects harshly criticized the company for its involvement in the spread of fake news and voiced their concern that the company has  “created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” They cite, in part, Facebook’s ad-driven model, that created a portal to draw in and keep users. Into this growing public discussion surrounding our affinity for screens enters Screens: Virtual Material at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, a…

When is resistance futile, and when is it an effective tool for change? Throughout history and across the globe, women, people of color, and other marginalized groups have resisted against the abuse of power. The film exhibition List Projects: Civil Disobedience, which ran July 18 through October 29 of 2017 at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, invited us to take a look back at how we’ve resisted — sometimes successfully, sometimes not — at historical turning points: the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and the Gay and Gender Rights…

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