Newest Features
PROFILE: WALLY GILBERT By Nabeela Ahmed The polymath is in danger of becoming a dying breed. In days of yore, it was not considered exceptional for the likes of Leonardo da Vinci to whip up masterpieces whilst also investigating profound questions in anatomy and physics. In today’s society however, educational courses and career paths have become increasingly specific and specialized, so the idea of scientist, turned businessman, turned artist might seem a strange one. But Nobel-prize winning art photographer, Wally Gilbert personifies that idea. It may be one thing to dabble, but…
BIG RED ON-THE-TOWN: BOSTON CENTER FOR THE ARTS By Big Red Friday June 26, 2009 Candid snaps from a Big RED night on-the-town at “And The Fair Moon Rejoices: Contemporary Visionaries In The Wake Of Blake” with work by: Larry Bamburg, Tory Fair, Sharon Harper, Tania Kitchell, Justine Kurland, and Cristina Lei Rodriguez and presenting the Golden Hour –a rotating selection of video projections on view each week, Thurs, Fri, Sat, 8-9 pm by artists including: Julia Hechtman, Suara Welitoff, and Ethan Rose Organized by Randi Hopkins and Emily Isenberg Boston Center for…
A REPORT FROM THE PHANTOM ZONE By Steve Aishman I pull over into a gas station that has a fruit stand set-up in the parking lot. You know, one of those stands under a tent with a huge hand painted sign that looks like a Walker Evans photo. Everything is the size of something else. Oranges the size of grapefruit. Grapefruit the size of watermelon. “It’s all organic. 100% natural.” Says the teenage girl behind the counter without lifting her head to look at me. Bored. Hot. Tired. She looks like she’s been…
INTERVIEW WITH MARY OTIS STEVENS By Martina Tanga Local architect Mary Otis Stevens might be known to you, especially residents of Lincoln Massachusetts, for a very particular home built in the 1970s not far away from the famous dwelling of the Bauhaus director, Walter Gropius. The Modernist building, made out of austere concrete, was decidedly at odds with the other homely New England facades. The most baffling aspect of the house was that it had no doors! This seemed to deliberately go against the American standard home, where compartmentalization of space is key:…
FOR MY BEST BELOVED SISTER MIA: JULIA MARGARET CAMERON @ THE PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART By Matthew Nash There is, perhaps, no better known photo album than the one Julia Margaret Cameron created for her sister Mia in the 1860s. Her images are haunting and fascinating, a glimpse into a world that is forever gone and that few were able to capture. Through her explorations in the then new media of photography, we find a connection to a time that seems distant and foreign, while also feeling the tenderness of family and friends…
THE HURT LOCKER AND THE CONTEMPORARY WAR FILM By James A. Nadeau War films serve many functions in our society. On a superficial level they are entertainment. They follow the conventions of their genre, which were well established in the early days of cinema. We may not view Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) as a stereotypical example of a war film. After all it veers closer to slapstick and situation comedy than the existential moral questioning that later films attempted (I am thinking of The Grand Illusion which is about WWI but certainly…
A LETTER FROM THE ROAD By Matthew Nash For the last few days, my wife and I have been traveling up the coast of Maine, hitting all the shopping towns along the way: Portland, Freeport, Boothbay Harbor. We are unabashedly tourists, looking at every lobster-shaped trinket and moose emblazoned doodad. Yesterday we ate lobster for every meal, just because we could. Passing through all of these tourist trap towns, we have seen a lot of art. I mean, a LOT of art, and at first I didn’t pay too much attention. I see…
THE DECORDOVA’S BIENNIAL: A VERMONTER’S PERSPECTIVE By Marc Awodey On the morning Big RED & Shiny published a blog post about the DeCordova’s 2010 Biennial selections, a Vermont gallerist shot to my publisher and me — I’m Art Critic for the Vermont alternative weekly Seven Days — a fiery e-mail saying “How is this possible? Is VT no longer part of New England? Are all of the artists in this state so bad that they couldn’t find one to meet their criteria?” In the article, Big RED listed the Biennial’s seventeen selected…