Newest Features
By JACQUELINE HOUTON Fully embracing Duchamp’s declaration, “The spectator makes the picture,” Cambridge’s Art Interactive has for five years displayed cutting-edge art that invites audience participation. Its latest show, Soundmarks, removes the picture from the equation, avowing that sound can be as rich a source for art as imagery. Unfortunately, the exhibition fails to fully realize the promise of this intriguing premise, for its emotional and intellectual power only sporadically rises above the level of white noise. Soundmarks comprises five sound and video installations, two by Amy Stacey Curtis and three by…
By KAREN SCHIFF When you walk into the Allston Skirt Gallery this month, it looks as if Roberta Paul’s spin on “Creation : Science” is all mapped out. Her exhibition’s title suggests a fundamental Question: Who gets the final word on the cosmos — theologians or astronomers? And on the wall opposite the entrance appears Paul’s diptych of paintings, as big as an Answer. One panel features Adam and Eve, larger than life, wailing and covering themselves (in an image patterned after Massaccio’s “Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise”). To their…
By MATTHEW NASH In his new body of work, titled “Bathyscape,” Andrew Mowbray attacks the notion of hegemonic masculinity, and employs the critical devices of post-feminism within a series of questions about his own role as a male. Through a series of performances and installations, he sets up a vision of his male character as wholly artificial, enhanced by props and devices that are only logical within the extreme artificiality of the persona he has created. In Mowbray’s world, the trappings of a masculine life are tied to the activities in which…
By JAMES NADEAU “Subculture tends to be presented as an independent organism functioning outside the larger social, political and economic contexts. As a result, the picture of subculture is often incomplete.” Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style 1979 It has become a signature of contemporary artists to obliterate the divide between high and low culture. The act of mining “low” and pop culture (although clichéd) serves to illustrate just how illusory these differentiations are. “High” and “low” are purely cultural constructions. It is a belief in an inherent aesthetic difference between…
By MATTHEW NASH After nineteen months and twelve shows, Second Gallery will be closing this summer. Rebecca Gordon, the 23-year-old director of Second Gallery, will be heading off to Chicago for graduate school, and will be turning over the space to new leadership at the end of summer. “In a way it seems a bit silly to close it now because it feels like it’s just getting off the ground. Maybe so, but I feel that it is time for me to move forward and work on other things.” Gordon said over…
By MICAH J. MALONE Sean Horton has always had a knack for initiating projects. At one time or another, Sean has been integral to the founding of a record label, a gallery, an online arts journal and a graphic design business. What all of these projects share is a passion for finding new talent, keeping an independent and creative spirit in business and above all, I suspect, is the classic desire to own one’s own labor. Originally hailing from the great state of Texas, Sean Horton made his way to Boston for…
By MICAH J. MALONE I’m going to be sick to my stomach. Christoph Büchel and Mass MoCA are still at it, with no ideal or agreeable solution in sight. As it stands at this moment, the museum will continue with “Made at Mass MoCA”, a “documentary” that shows the remains of Büchel’s unfinished project with covered tarps over large objects Büchel either brought in or had built. I have not seen the exhibition, nor do I care too, as the dilemma of the project itself is compelling and wrenching enough. With budgets…
By BEN SLOAT Andres Serrano is an artist who came to national acclaim in the early 1990s with his controversial photographs appropriating religious imagery. At the time he was famously labeled by conservative Senator Jesse Helms as “not an artist, but a jerk.” Since that period, Serrano has made a number of photographic series on subjects as diverse as the Ku Klux Klan, homeless people in New York City, corpses in the morgue, and his most recent book “America”, a series of portraits reflecting numerous characters in the country’s diversity. Serrano sat…