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A panorama opens as you approach the crest of Prospect Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts. The vastness in graduated shades of distant blues and greens, immediately loosens one’s hold on time and space. A 180-degree view encompasses noteworthy peaks, from left to right, Wachusetts, Watatic, Monadnock, Pack Monadnock, North Pack Monadnock, and Uncanoonuc. Reciting aloud, the indigenous dialect becomes a timeless incantation, a chorus in common with other wayfarers. I am a traveller on the road to Fruitlands, the self-named nineteenth-century Utopian endeavor of Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane. The Fruitlands homestead is…
Helen Singh-Miller is an artist and practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education. Grand Union (2018), her new film incorporating elements of family life and postmodern dance, will be installed at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo this fall. Drawing on somatic education and contemporary dance, her still and moving-image work explores the relationship between visual representation and embodied experience. Singh-Miller teaches TIME in Studio Foundation at MassArt and runs the Storefront for Somatic Practice in Cambridge, MA. We spoke recently about her new film. Grand is the seen, the light,…
“The Last Days of Pompeii” is a loaded phrase, conjuring both tragedy and opulence. Multimedia artist and musician Delia Gonzalez takes these words and burns them across a wall in a sultry pink, neon script in her solo exhibition List Projects: Delia Gonazalez, on view in the MIT List Visual Arts Center’s intimate Bakalar Gallery. With its ambivalent evocation of both welcome and warning, The Last Days of Pompeii acts as a portal to Gonzalez’s world, where ancient and modern signifiers of wealth and pleasure mingle, all within an atmosphere of clairvoyant…
Tucked between Kevin Beasley’s immersive multi-room solo show and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, Caitlin Keogh’s first solo museum exhibition, Blank Melody, greets viewers with a handful of large scale, vibrant paintings. From a quick stroll around the gallery, it is almost immediately apparent that this assemblage of works is different from the others that bookend it. Blank Melody is site-specific. Keogh and her collaborators, including assistant curator Jeffrey De Blois, poet Charity Coleman, and artist Graham Anderson, created something of a Gesamtkunstwerk in this space. Though Keogh’s name…
Nike Air Jordan 1 shoes, durags, rain jackets, kaftans, mouth guards, feathers, fitted caps, microphones, sound effect processors, amplifiers, polyurethane foam, and resin are all materials Kevin Beasley focuses on to evoke the spectral traces of the past and present using sound, space, and signifiers of Blackness. Upon entering the gallery, viewers are greeted by Strange Fruit (Pair 1), an interactive sculpture suspended from the ceiling comprised of ropes from which a pair of Nike Air Jordan 1 shoes hang — a nod to the urban tradition of flinging a pair of…
*signage encouraging social interaction, held aloft by assistants at the entrances to Art Basel Returning from the commotion of Art Basel, its “region-wide art week,” and an exploration of Vienna, I’m encouraged to consider the interactive public and private art spheres. Of course, the nature of contemporary art in Europe, as in the USA, fundamentally concerns imaginative modes of integrating art and life, admitting of many fraught connections with the world. Within the urban experience of a deeply historical city such as Vienna one witnesses abundant evidence of a renewed right-wing present.…
Carissa Rodriguez’s exhibition The Maid is currently on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The exhibition includes several video works and photographs. The Maid examines the complex interconnections inherent to power dynamics in relation to labor. This is achieved through a critical examination of the production process of art, and how the process itself is tied intrinsically to the image of the artist as laborer. Of further interest to Rodriguez is the specific context of the fabrication of the artwork, and how the often-overlooked part of this process is in…
Tatiana Klusak’s work examines the various social cues and cultural norms we become accustomed to as we grow up. Beneath the playful and humorous surface of her work lies feelings of doubt, strain, inefficacy, and confusion. I’ll Tell You When You’re Older, on view at The Distillery Gallery through July 22, evokes systems of religious veneration. Klusak intentionally disquiets the viewer with surreal assemblages of filigreed boxes, synthetic hair, toys, draperies, and amorphous masses, all of which remain untitled. As the exhibition title suggests, we may not be mature enough yet to…