Since I missed the openings last Friday, I decided to spend the day checking out shows in the South End and on Newbury Street. I saw a lot of great work, and was struck by how rapidly SoWA has changed…
By MATTHEW GAMBER Imagine: a table set, a set of chairs, all beautifully crafted – a desirable set of furniture. However, the only interruption, transgressing one’s desire for the object, are the large intersecting planks, symbolizing invisible light from a…
By JAMES NADEAU “The indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual, is definitely not produced in the head or the mind.” — Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image With…
This afternoon I took a short ride on the #39 bus to the Fenway to check out four shows at MassArt and the The School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Overall I was really happy with the experience, and…
Tonight Platform2 hosted an event dubbed the Failure Support Group for a crowded hall of artists and friends. The event featured a series of artists presenting various failures from their lives. I am proud to admit that I presented a…
Belgian artist David Claerbout’s first museum survey exhibitition in the US will open this Friday at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. In an article I wrote about his work in 2004, I summarized: “In his work, David Claerbout moves between…
The nice weather has encouraged me to get out of the house more than I usually would in January, so I’ve seen a lot of art recently and thought I’d share some of my favorites and encourage everyone to get…
The Buchel fiasco is past, and Building 5 at Mass MoCA has a new installation, PROJECTIONS, by Jenny Holzer. (you can view a webcam image of the installation at http://www.massmoca.org/projections.php). Holzer is reknown internationally for her text pieces which are…
A couple of months ago a group of artists got together, dressed up as superheroes and took some pictures. It got a modicum of press around town. We blogged about it back in August. It also sparked a bit of…
I had originally planned to write a review of the new issue of Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media for issue #71 of Big RED & Shiny, however now that I’m spending time with the disc it seems more appropriate…
By BEN SLOAT The famed Russian born novelist (and noted lepidopterist) Vladimir Nabokov once wrote to his mother of the creative process: “We are translators of God’s creation, his little plagiarists and imitators, we dress up what he wrote, as…
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND I don’t know how many times I’ve seen someone describe the volume of his or her headache. Though I can attribute this to Excedrin’s popular, “I’ve got a headache this big” commercial, it is an example of…
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND The best way to critique the absurd is with the absurd; the more flamboyant the critique, usually, the more potent the message.CoachTV, the Raishad Glover and Emily Eastridge “enterprise,” wastes few opportunities for flamboyance in The Buffet…
By MATTHEW GAMBER A contemporary riddle: How many Ansel Adams calendars does the Sierra Club have to sell to support awareness of the John Muir trail? Based on sales, many admire a tree more in a photograph, which is perhaps…
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND Do all stories have a climax, breaking point, or fulcrum of sorts? Well, they all can, but how the story is spoken, written, played, drawn, or however the author, (whether they know they are an author not),…
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND Deep Wounds is nothing new from Brian Knep, though it was a commissioned piece, and—to his credit—by both the Office for the Arts of Harvard University and the Department of Systems Biology of Harvard Medical School. If…
By ANNEKA LENSSEN February brings a (free) looped screening of works by video art titans Francis Alys, David Claerbout, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, William Kentridge, Pipilotti Rist, and Anri Sala to Harvard Square. Just pop out of the T station…
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND The irony of much public art, especially that which came in the last third of the 20th century, is that it is hardly public at all. It does not engage the intended audience; it is too abstruse…
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND Cinema is principally a visual medium; movement and light (i.e. color and shade) are its essential properties. Some of its ancillary aspects are visual composition, in the same way as painting, and synchronized sound, which only came…
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND The ubiquity of the grid in our culture may explain the fascination with it. Unconsciously, consciously and self-consciously, artists, designers, mathematicians and just about everybody who’s ever sat in front of a computer employs the grid to…