By SAM MCKINNISS In Real Art Ways’ front room gallery, Zak Ove’s group of photographs entitled Blue Devils (from the Transfigura series) greets viewers with a startling view of Trinidad Carnival. Large-scale photographs show men and women in gruesome masquerade…
By MIKE MENNONNO Stacey Alickman’s work comes in two flavors: acrylics – or oil – on canvas, and gouache on paper. Her rich, dark and dense acrylic and oil canvases are sprinkled with bright, fanciful creatures composed of simple shapes,…
By JUDY KERMIS BLOTNICK “Painting broke my heart…. but it also saved my life,” said Gerry Bergstein at his gallery talk on December 5th. A romantic and a realist, an avid fan of contemporary culture and a man whose visual…
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA Comedy refuses mortality. That is Buster Keaton’s lesson, and why, I think, he is a greater artist than Charlie Chaplin. There is something too elaborately contrived about all of Chaplin’s encounters with disaster; he simpers too…
By MICAH MALONE & MATTHEW NASH While editing the article “How To Start And Run An Alternative Gallery Space” by Big RED publisher Matthew Nash in issue #118, editor Micah Malone proposed: I would love a piece that talks more…
By ALISE UPITIS & MEG ROTZEL Performa, the New York-based performance art biennale, had its third iteration in November. Performa’s founding director and curator is RoseLee Goldberg, who in 1979 published the first, now seminal, history of performance art. This…
Last evening at MassArt’s Pozen Center, about 200 people gathered for “Spark: A Gala Celebration”. The event was created for three reasons, each worth a party in their own right. The big news of the evening was that the Axiom…
By MATTHEW NASH Of all the things I find most difficult as an artist, it is the problem of turning one’s own personal experience and ideas into something that others can understand that seems to be the most universal. Many…
By JAMES A. NADEAU It seems fitting that Tobias Putrih and MOS (an architectural collective) have their recent piece Without Out installed at MIT. If for no other reason that it’s aesthetic certainly reflects a couple of buildings not only…
By AARON HOWLAND You’re walking through the city at 3 AM. It’s pitch black; it’s silent; you’re alone on the streets. You turn a corner and see a car in flames. Bodies burn before your eyes; the metal hull of…
By ZACHARY DELUCA The Comfort of Strangers Described by its creator as a “roving supper,” Wink hardly sounds like a work of art. The premise and practice of Wink is deceptively simple: as a private chef, he cooks a multi-course…
By RICKY TUCKER My Bit in the Grand Illusion: a writer wanders through the American Repertory Theatre’s experiential theater. We’d all arrived to the dream as willing spectators, and from that point forth our perceptions were made to be obstructed;…
By JAMES A. NADEAU This Tuesday marks the twentieth anniversary of Day Without Art. Begun on December 1st, 1989, the Day Without Art (now known as Day With(Out) Art) was created to spread awareness of the destructive power of AIDS,…
By MATTHEW NASH Andrew Mowbray is a sculptor in the tradition of Joseph Beuys, whose objects exist to facilitate a performative act, and remain as tangible evidence of that experience. His new body of work, Tempest Prognosticator, is currently on…