Newest Features
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND On Sunday, November 5, 2006, the 401st Guy Fawkes Night was celebrated. Today, we bring to you the 51st issue of Big RED and shiny. The most significant change to Big RED for Issue 51 is the absense of the Forum, which we’ve humanely euthanized. Issue number 51 is also my 4th issue as an Executive Editor. With the title of Executive Editor comes a series of new editorial responsibilities, which I am very excited about. For instance, Big RED and Shiny cannot endorse anyone running for public office.…
By Artist’s desire to create a better reality through alternative communities is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, it has been the goal of the avant-garde for the past century to merge art with everyday life through an alternate lifestyle. The artwork on view in Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present, at the RISD Museum is broken into two exhibitions which explore this theme. Providence Poster Art 1995-2005 covers three galleries with eye-popping posters, silk-screen prints and photocopies from over 150 artists. An installation called Shangri-la-la-land fills the Museum’s central gallery with imagined…
By MATTHEW NASH On Friday, November 3 there were two competing receptions to choose from. The first was the juggernaut of SoWa First Fridays, usually crowded with a wide range of Boston art lovers, and an ecclectic mix of artwork in the dozen galleries of the Thayer Street complex and other nearby Harrison Street. The second was a one-night-only event at the tiny Axiom Gallery in Cambridge’s Inman Square for a show called “Art Cake: The Delicious Transient New Medium”. The openings in SoWa were, as always, full of conversation and hand-shaking.…
By MARIA LACRETA Sharon Lockhart’s newest look at childhood, Pine Flat, was shown at the Harvard Film Archive, in conjunction with Pine Flat Portrait Studio, a series of 19 portraits at Harvard’s Sackler museum, made of the kids in the film. The film has twelve, ten-minute segments in entirety, each segment with a leader of black pausing before it. Pine Flat, opens with a wall of magnum-sized, snow-covered trees. Out of the pensive storm, we find a young girl—or portrait, within the film. The girl is poised still and is reading from…
By ARTHUR WHITMAN Among the many paradoxes that pervade Gerry Bergstein’s life and art (and these interpenetrate in myriad ways), perhaps the most central is that of his status in the world of art. He is at once a classic painter, reaching toward the to be hoped-for fecundity of old age, and an exceptionally contemporary artist, immersed in the flotsam and jetsam of today’s popular culture. He deploys his immense painterly skill and bravura – techniques ranging from trompe l’oeil to paint scratching and impasto – in the service of a jumbled…
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND I don’t know how many times I’ve seen someone describe the volume of his or her headache. Though I can attribute this to Excedrin’s popular, “I’ve got a headache this big” commercial, it is an example of a synaesthetic metaphor, where size is used to describe a physical sensation inside one’s skull. Is the manner of which we are cognizant of the headache itself better suited to a description by size rather than intensity? It depends on the person, however, the commonality of this type of communication may prompt…
By BIG RED October 14th 2006 Candid snaps from a Big RED night on-the-town at the opening reception for the exhibit “PURE”, an exhibit performances and works by more than 70 artists at a former office supply superstore in Brighton Mills Shopping Plaza . PURE
By BIG RED October 21, 2006 Jane Farver and Bill Arning of MIT asked Big RED & Shiny to co-host a tour for the Friends of Boston Art group on Saturday, October 21. Big RED ‘s Matthew Nash helped put together a tour of studios and alt-spaces in Boston, and a great day was had by all. The tour started at MIT to view some new or recently-returned public sculptures, a visit to the Berwick Research Institute to see the work of Liz Nofziger, Christy Georg, Chris Wawrinofsky and Ben Durrell. From…