Newest Features
By MATTHEW NASH Print this article The first time I watched Pulp Fiction, the Quentin Tarantino film that changed how many people saw cinema, I was watching a knock-off. At the time, my close friend Jason Dean was living on 42nd Street and the movie had barely hit theatres. On the sidewalks below his apartment men had spread out blankets or opened briefcases full of goods, and whole world of products unavailable anywhere else in the world could be bought for nothing: $4 for movies currently in the theatres; $12 for Rolex…
By BENJAMIN TIVEN Print this article The Photographic Resource Center is currently presenting a show in conjunction with the Boston CyberArts Festival calledLand/Mark: Locative Media and Photography through May 5th. The show includes four photographers (one of whom is actually an anonymous collective), and it describes the increasingly complex web of relationships between imagery, mapping, location and experience. Though visually divergent, the work shares a fusing of traditional photographic practices with evolving digital mapping technologies. While not necessarily landscape photography in the traditional sense, the images innovatively re-imagine and enliven the essential…
By DINA DEITSCH Print this article Man walks into a room… In the novel by the same title a blank room is the loose metaphor for a mind stripped of adult memory. The book ponders the stability and meaning of memory and its hold over our notions of identity. Are memories fixed or do they exist in a room-like state which we enter and leave at random? Walking into the Media Field gallery at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) immediately brought the book to mind – here was that room…
By JED SPEARE Print this article When Pope John Paul II died , there sounded in the city of Warsaw the air-raid, civil defense siren for over one minute. I lost count of how many iterations there were, perhaps fifteen. It must have been slightly chilling for anyone over 65, awakening the memory of bombings. But the fact of using the air raid warning system to announce the death of the Pope seemed an unfortunate way to have to do it because of these mixtures of meaning. Perhaps what is at issue…
By BIG RED NEWS EDITOR Print this article It seems as if the drama around the theft of artwork from the Gardner Museum will never end. This past week, on March 23rd, Myles Conner was arrested in Natick in connection with the robbery of $700 worth of watches from a jeweler. Conner is suspected as the mastermind behind the theft of the artwork from The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. He was investigated by the FBI, despite having the airtight alibi of being in police custody at the time of the…
By CHARLES GIULIANO Print this article Charles Giuliano is willing to sacrifice his liver for a good interview. Recently, he began publishing his Beer and Burgers series, in which he sits down with those involved in Boston’s arts and takes notes while sipping beer. Below are three recent installments fromBeer and Burgers, interviews with George Fifield of the Boston CyberArts Festival, Matthew Nash of Big RED & Shiny, and James Manning of Alternate Currents and Space 200. Beer and Burgers With… George Fifield Director Previews Cyberarts Festival“I opened the door to a…
By BEN SLOAT Print this article Currently showing at the Tufts University Tisch Gallery is an exhibition by the photographer Lauren Greenfield titled “Girl Culture.” Greenfield photographs girls and young women in various guises such as beauty queens, fashionistas, victims of body image, and as dominant members of the high school in-crowd to reflect the impact of American society on the female body. Stating that “these images are about the popular culture we share and the way the culture leaves its imprint on individuals in their most public and private moments,” Greenfield…
By REESE INMAN Print this article The artists of “Incremental Disruption” comprise a fascinating triumvirate. NAO director Karine Jouenne’s curatorial statement references technology writer Michael Schrage’s influential arguments for the transformational power of small, incremental changes, stating that the exhibition “explores aspects of ‘incrementalism’ on a conceptual and aesthetic level.” I would add that the incremental disruptions of which Jouenne speaks occur largely in relation to our preexisting notions and experience of landscape – most of the work in this show operates based on reference to landscape, whether the character of the…