Every week, BR&S picks out a series of gallery events, screenings, exhibitions, performances. Here are our choices for you to go & see:
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Clint's Pick!
Friday September 12 2014
New Art Center 61 Washington Park Newtonville, MA
Far from Indochine
Including the work of: Dewey Ambrosino, Patty Chang and David Kelley, Frédéric Sanchez
2015 will mark the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The New Art Center's next Curatorial Opportunity Program exhibition Far from Indochine presents three contemporary projects about Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam that engage with the myths and ideas that formed the backdrop of the war. Through film, photography, painting and sculpture, four artists from France and the United States contemplate the modern and the global in Southeast Asia.
Contrary to how it is perceived in the U.S., the Vietnam War was not just a proxy battle of Cold War giants. It embroiled Laos and Cambodia as North Vietnam expanded the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the U.S. rained down bombs and recruited highland minorities as allies. It was a war tied to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide, as well as the persecution and forced exodus of Hmong communities that crossed national borders. This exhibition considers that region without borders as its historical inheritance and revisits the war not as an event, but as part of an ongoing making of the modern. Indochine was borne out of French colonial imaginings of a land waiting to be civilized and educated in the Enlightenment tenets of equality, liberty and fraternity. Meanwhile, the Modern art movements of Europe reinvigorated their practices with ideas and techniques from Asia, Africa and other regions of the colonized world.
The title of the exhibition echoes the New Wave anti-war documentary Far from Vietnam (1967), directed by Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. In the spirit of the film, the three projects that make up the exhibition question recycled imaginings of a region once known as Indochine.
Opening Reception:
Friday, September 12
6 pm - 8:30 pm
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Tuesday September 9 2014
School of the Museum of Fine Arts 230 The Fenway, Boston, MA
Reverb: New Art from Greece
SMFA presents eleven emerging and mid-career Greek artists whose works reflect the way artists are currently interpreting the reverberations of social, political, and economic conditions during a crucial time in Greece’s history. Guest curated by Eirene Efstathiou and Evita Tsokanta. Artists featured are Loukia Alavanou, Anastasia Douka, Eirene Efstatiou, Andreas Kassapis, Dimitris Papoutsakis, Eftihis Patsourakis, Nana Sachini, Yorgos Sapountzis, Vangelis Vlahos, Paky Vlassopoulou, and Myrto Xanthopoulou.
Opening Reception:
Tuesday, September 9
5 pm - 7 pm
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Thursday September 11 2014
Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College Main College Building, Fourth Floor, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA
Retina Riot
Andrew Fish and Nancy Hayes are gifted colorists. Their paintings are saturated with an intense interplay between complementary colors and values while displaying consummate understanding of placement so that our retinal cone cells (the color receivers) are working overtime. But they do more—color’s siren call beckons us to enter their worlds intrigued by their push-pull compositions and manipulation of spatial relationships. Both artists evoke multi-layered responses with their imagery.
Andrew Fish works with oils in a masterfully brusque style. His forms undulate in specificity, popping out or seeping into their surrounding fields. His figures are contingently with us. They seem engaged in ordinary tasks but their very existence seems fragile. His roaring red work: Meeting the Shadow 05 casts doubt on the corporeality of his protagonist as he almost dissolves in the strong backlighting from the window behind him. We "almost see" him—in a converging composition that suggests forced perspective.
Nancy Hayes is devoted to perpetuating a shape repetitiously yet exploring scale and placement, building her compositions so that we are continually discovering new relationships. Her works evoke cellular or botanical motifs, while others seem to sprout machine generated versions of her patterns that call to mind our increasingly fretful understanding of what is alive or how we comprehend the world. Her work Pores and Orbs 5, is an uneasy truce between the two.
Fish and Hayes are painters challenging us visually through their thorough understanding of
color and form. Their works make us question and consider our world and how we are part of it.
Opening Reception
Thursday, September 11
5 pm - 7 pm
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Friday September 12 - Friday October 17 2014
Essex Art Center 56 Island Street, Lawrence, MA
MCINDOE: New paintings by Johnathan Henriquez
The paintings in this exhibition are based on Archibald McIndoe a plastic surgeon from New Zealand who worked for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He greatly improved the treatment and rehabilitation of badly burned air crewmen. He treated very deep burns and serious facial disfigurement like loss of eyelids. His patients formed the Guinea Pig Club. McIndoe kept referring to them as his "boys" and the staff called him "The Boss" or "The Maestro". McIndoe’s boys were not ordinary people you would see walking down the street. They did not have a proper jaw line, nor an intact nose.
Jonathan Henriquez, in his artist statement, says: "i feel like a plastic surgeon when i’m painting. Every canvas i work on is just a new boy i'm going to have under my name that i can express my thoughts or feelings through. From 4 heads to 8 heads or even 3 eyes to 6 eyes, my criteria carries on with deformed faces, that can all relate to the Guinea Pig Club and as for the creator, Archibald Mclndoe , I JON HEN can reflect on him."
Opening Reception & Artist Talk
Friday, September 12
5 pm
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Saturday, September 13 2014
Trident Gallery 189 Main Street, Gloucester, MA
Susan Erony: Review
Trident Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Susan Erony’s art of testimony, remembrance, and affirmation of the human capacity for good and evil.
Erony’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and throughout North America, and has been collected by leading institutions and private collectors.
Review reintroduces collectors and the public to the artist’s disciplined and forceful body of work from 1993 to the present, and to her themes of inhumanity and displacement, the solace and refuge of art, and the interplay of innocence, knowing, and not wanting to know.
In her most recent work, Erony continues to employ unusual and freighted materials in mixed media constructions — cement, seaweed, silk, lead, rust, and burned paper — and haunting images of her own eyes become potent emblems of a moral witness.
Reception
Saturday, September 13
5 pm - 7 pm
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Carley's pick!
Saturday, September 13 2014
The Paramount Center 559 Washington Street, Boston, MA
Balagan presents... Outré Montréal
Montreal continues to be a source of innovative experimental cinema that is rooted in hands-on, formally adventurous production -- thanks, in part, to the exuberant activities of the Double Negative filmmakers' collective. Co-presented with Bright Lights (Emerson), this program highlights a number of works from Double Negative members and their friends completed in the last several years.
Guest Filmmakers Daïchi Saïto and Eduardo Menz will discuss the screening with the audience in a post-screening Q&A.
See the entire program here.
