Newest Features
BIG RED ON-THE-TOWN: FIRST FRIDAY (PART ONE) By Big Red Friday, September 5th, 2008 Candid snaps from a Big RED night on-the-town at SoWA First Fridays. Photos by Christian Holland.
BIG RED ON-THE-TOWN: PLATFORM2:PARADE FOR THE FUTURE By BIG RED Saturday, September 13th, 2008 Candid snaps from a Big RED day on-the-town at The Boston Common for “A Parade For The Future”, an event by Platform2. “Come one, come all to a Parade for the Future! Let’s celebrate what hasn’t happened yet, notably the impending submergence of our city under water due to climate change. On Sunday, June 15th, Platform2 will lead a Parade for the Future in the form of a giant blue wave. We will gather outside the Park Street T…
DAVE COLE @ JUDI ROTENBERG GALLERY By James Nadeau “There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are not just tools of destruction but also of perception… “ – Paul Virilio “Military Force is Based Upon Deception.” We are constantly inundated with images of war. It is a central part of the American experience. War created our country and our culture wrestles with the ramifications of its presence on a day-to-day basis thanks to the current Iraq war. Even as children we “play” at war. Granted, I…
STEVE HOLLINGER @ CHASE GALLERY By Matthew Nash In five glass tanks, small pods float suspended, occcasionally fluttering. Nearby, a glass cube houses hunks of metal detritus. Broken globes, suspended like a science experiment, are attached to an apparatus that pushes blue liquid through tiny tubes. Wispy bits of imagery, like the memories of photographs, hang preserved in tubes or suspended in a box. This is Steve Hollinger’s “What’s Left,” an exhibition that is part memory, part dreamscape, and part science lab. The individual pieces are bound together in their strange overlapping of…
A REPORT FROM THE PHANTOM ZONE By Steve Aishman I have a question for you about child rearing: What do you do about a child who is behaving badly just for the attention? You don’t want to acknowledge the behavior because that is exactly what the child wants, but at the same time, you want to correct the behavior. So what do you do? In this case, I have an art critic’s dilemma. Should I write about work that I believe has, at least mostly, been created to gain as much negative attention…
FALL PREVIEW By Christian Holland The fall is when Boston returns to its routine. The melancholy season marks the beginning of the familiar discomfort we know as New England weather and, for hundreds of thousands of young Bostonians, it’s back to school. However, as the city’s regular state of affairs re-emerges from its summer catnap, a fresh season for galleries and museums commences and there’s suddenly so much to do. We can’t skip the cultural institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, however – even though they’re just the tip-of-the-iceberg in terms…
NATHAN LEWIS @ SETON ART GALLERY By Stephen V. Kobasa What if there was painting that mattered? There is an unequivocal answer to this question in the survey of work by Nathan Lewis now on exhibit in West Haven, Connecticut. Nothing is to be found here of those artists whose technique is their only subject. Lewis’s skill with paint – painstaking and inventive – is literally invisible; at the center of his art is an imagination that defies inevitability. His is the free world: honest about its terrors, but not reducible to…
A SPECIAL COMMENT By Matthew Nash & Matthew Gamber Since our inception, Big RED & Shiny has always been created by artists as a way to discuss our local community and how it fits into a larger art world. Most of the people who contribute to this project are artists. Naturally, we don’t always agree, we don’t necessarily like the same things, and we certainly care about what happens here and want to encourage growth and positive change. It is inevitable that an artist-run publication like ours will eventually find itself reviewing…