Newest Features
By The Editors October 12, 2012 Luther Price is hot shit these days… cue list of credits. He’s also an artist with remarkable discipline, dedication and modesty who lives and works in a small beach-front cottage in Revere. So his recent trip into the limelight should really remind all artists that these are qualities to be nurtured. Tara Nelson is a film-maker, living and working in Boston, who was invited to attend the prestigious, and not a little mysterious, Flaherty Film Seminar earlier this year. She, like Luther, attended MassArt and even…
By Leah Triplett October 11, 2012 Silence Toby Kamps and Steve Seid, with a contribution by Jenni Sorkin Published Aug 20, 2012 112 p., 90 color illus. ISBN: 9780300179644 $45.00 If you are like me this October, you will be spending most of the month in Boston immersed in the din of work and play, with occasional noise of a football game. Luckily for us, however, there is a retreat in the form of the Silence catalogue. An exhibition of paintings, sculpture and video that explores silence as an artistic theme,…
By The Editors October 11, 2012 We’ve all seen Boston’s city hall, and we’ve all got an opinion about it. The haters believe that it’s a symbol of Boston city government’s insanity, and the lovers think that it’s a historic building worth our attention. Today, I think it’s a great example of a cement, sculptural building and we should probably value it more than hating it. I’ll probably change my mind tomorrow. I think that is the type of relationship most of us have with city hall. I’ve even heard multiple…
By John Pyper October 10, 2012 I remember the day that George Herbert Walker Bush ordered the invasion of Kuwait/Iraq and began what is now called the Gulf War. I was in high school, and the entire population of my school came into the building with a quietness that was both palpably spiritual and practical– we had grown up in relative peace and were not sure of our futures. We were about to be the rate age for the draft, and the last war we knew about was in Vietnam.…
By Stephanie Cardon October 10, 2012 For our first issue of the revamped Big Red & Shiny, Ben Street, curator, art writer, lecturer and co-creator of the Sluice Art Fair, London, has been ruminating on the semantically slippery state, and often absurd content, of art writing. Several recent articles have revived the perennial mocking of pompous art-speak, nonsensical press releases and florid artist statements. Ben himself took on the topic of institutionalized language last year, when he was blogging for Art 21. Last September 24th, GalleristNY purportedly found the “best sentence…
By The Editors October 09, 2012 Chances are you or a loved one went to an art school for undergrad. If you did, it’s also probable that you went through a foundations course your first year. This “painters should learn how to sculpt and photographers should learn how to draw” mentality has been handed down to us from the Bauhaus. In this month’s journal, Aaron Willette and Rob Trumbour, a pair of trained architects, explore how the history of installations from the 60’s and 70’s can help architecture grow as…
Welcome to the first of many interviews that Matthew Kuhlman has conducted with various artists from the Boston area! We’ll be publishing them twice a month, and hope you like them. You can download them directly from us, just listen to them, and soon, subscribe to them via apple. Carlos Jimenez Cahua is a photographer and 2012 MFA graduate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Several of his pieces use exposure and distance increments to reveal the number of possibilities that can be achieved from the exact same subject, while…
By Lin A. Nulman October 09, 2012 Theater semiotics, one branch of the intellectual and theoretical pursuit of that art, analyzes stage elements as a chain of “signs” that signify meaning. This branch is tangled in undergrowth because some people know much more about how scholarship is done than about how theater is done, but it can be rewarding to ask a set or a costume, “What are you meant to signify?” It certainly is with The Nora Theatre Company’s production of The How and the Why, Sarah Treem’s play…