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Danielle Abrams’ (b. Queens, New York; lives and works in Boston) performances describe the multifaceted components inherent to a personal and radical interpretation of identity. She utilizes humor and narrative in her work, asserting that “laughter, incited by personifications of family and influential figures, is the linchpin to a reinvigorated interpretation of the self and others.” Abrams’ ability to take on multiple roles translates into her daily life—artist, professor, curator, and researcher into the Boston arts community who continues to have an impactful, rippling effect across generations of artists. Abrams is the Professor of…
Un/Settled is a show of works on paper at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Curator Jan Howard has selected works by contemporary RISD alumni from the museum’s collection. The general theme, with numerous variations, is geographic dislocation and the fleeting quality of visual memory. Most arresting in the first room of the exhibition is Serena Perrone’s large woodcut printed in gilded bronze ink on mylar with added metalpoint drawing, titled Tristessa: Reappearance of the Vanished Filicudi (III) . Seen through the aperture of a kind of mystical heraldic…
An exhibition of the work of New York-based artist Gordon Hall was on view at List Projects at the MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. Gordon’s practice incorporates Minimalist sculptural elements which are then navigated by the body of a performer. Audiences experience these works through viewing the live performance, or the sculptural relics. Conceptually, Hall calls attention to transitional moments—between understanding and the illusive, body and space, life and death. The relationship between inanimate object and performer, time, and place also become compositional elements of his work; levels of interconnection range from the…
Object of Dread, Castledrone’s latest, intimate exhibition is a series of paintings and performance documentation. The work presents artists Steve Locke and Creighton Baxter as the directors of their own surrealist fever dream. Although Steve Locke’s Cruising series was created ten years ago the work remains relevant as ever. The peering of the black character toward the audience represents a different kind of oppositional gaze. Walking into the character’s line of sight is reminiscent of an aside from a kitschy sitcom, laugh track and all. In one image, “Break”, he appears to…
Natasha Bowdoin’s installation Maneater takes over the entirety of MASS MoCA’s Hunter Hallway exhibition space. This meticulously layered work expands from floor to ceiling and spans the length of the corridor space, where it even wraps around an exit door onto a sidewall. Bowdoin imagines a space full of drawn and printed plants, vines, and floral clusters which appear healthy and alive, full of potential for further expansion. The growth feels ordered and chaotic all at once. The exhibition brochure explains, “Referencing such sources as Golden Age children’s book illustrations, 19th-century botanical…
Nearly sunset, and time on the water of 1984. Language its tracer. No image like the image of language. I had waded out about thigh deep. Then a shout from the beach. I held in my hand half a coconut shell of coconut milk and 150-proof rum and dumped it white into the waves when it came on me how sweet it had been, then the idea I was not finished, then the act of reaching down with the idea I would get it back. Having read Rodney Jones’s poem Hubris at…
The exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today at the ICA Boston includes the work of sixty artists, collaborations, and collectives. It demonstrates the detachment, escapism, and disenfranchisement of Internet users from various perspectives, as well as the Internet’s ability to bring about empowering change. Using unconventional modes of art-making, including html websites, algorithms, online games, and selfies, artists in this exhibition show how artistic expression changes with new technologies. Many of the works were conceived in the early 1990s, such as Nam June Paik’s Internet Dream (1994)…
Brooklyn-based artist Wangechi Mutu’s installation A Promise To Communicate, now on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, addresses complex issues regarding methodologies of communication, as well as the abstract, often arbitrary systems within which the body exists. Repurposing humanitarian aid rescue blankets as her primary material, Mutu has created a large-scale map that covers the museum’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. Shaped to suggest continental land masses, the molded blankets given to refugees in camps also allude to the absent human body, a haunting reminder off all the bodies…