Newest Features
Mare Liberum is self-described as “a freeform publishing, boatbuilding and waterfront art collective based in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn, New York.” While the group is in residence at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, they continue their ongoing interest in the public use of urban waterways, focusing on a playful, ephemeral photograph of a seafaring Le Corbusier—the architect who famously designed the Carpenter Center—as the point of entry into their work with Boston’s rivers. The exhibition text—published online, in booklet form, and on the gallery wall—moves quickly through scattered references…
Jodie Mim Goodnough is a Providence-based artist who uses photography, video, performance and sculpture to examine the various coping strategies we employ to find comfort in an often uncomfortable world, from religious rituals to pharmaceuticals and everything in between. She attended the photojournalism program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine and received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in May 2013. Sandra Erbacher spoke with Goodnough about her photographic process and research into mental illness, landscape, and politics on the occasion of…
Woander, curated by Corey Oberlander and Lindsey Stapleton and on view at GRIN until 29 August, confronts our heavily mediated relationship with nature. By calling attention to common clichés, taboos, past-times, and memories associated with our organic surroundings, the works by Raina Belleau, Andrea Wolf, Shamus Clisset, and Maria Molteni expose nature as a social, historical and culturally specific construct rather than an untouched ideal state. Far from being an explicit political critique that points the finger at our exploits of natural resources, the resulting climate change and other environmental catastrophes, Woander’s objective…
Relay, an experimental series of exhibitions presenting five artists in five different installations over five weeks, is an ambitious undertaking for Hera, a small membership-based non-profit gallery in southern Rhode Island. With a focus on process, ephemeralness of materials and interaction with the surrounding space, Hera, under gallery director and curator Abigail McGuire’s direction managed to bring together a noteworthy set of artists with diverging propositions that encompassed video, performance and installation: Mary Kudlak, David Namhon Kim, Jennifer Avery, Max Van Pelt, and McGuire herself. Max Van Pelt, Relay’s final artist, whose…
There’s a wonderful egolessness to James Cambronne’s work that is rarely found in abstraction. The ab-ex movement casts a long shadow, consequently the “unmonumental” abstraction of the ’90s and current “provisional” abstractions often feel more like a reaction to the New York School than an exploration of new territory. Not so with this show, which seems to come from a place of genuine curiosity and exploration. Cambronne’s painted installations currently on view at Proof Gallery are more concerned with phenomena than self-aggrandizement, and the show feels surprisingly open and organic given the…
In its 65th year, Art of the Northeast, on view through July 26th at Silvermine Arts Center, is unplugged. Out of the eighty-five works in the show, none are new media. Forty-two works are paintings, eleven are prints, six are drawings, three are ceramic vessels, three incorporate fabric/textiles, and one is a porcelain sculpture. Overall, the selected objects both possess a strong physical presence, and reference the history of modern art and design. This focus on materiality hones in on the sensibilities of the show’s co-jurors, Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam. Grabner…
Standing at the forefront of investigation and reflection into the complex social and cultural issues underlying a changing world, the List Visual Arts Center at MIT provides a perfect context for the Prague-based artist Eva Koťátková’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. “Be careful of that trap,” a gallery attendant alerts me. In most cases we would all agree that when a gallery attendant says something to a visitor, aside from a pleasant hello or how are you, the remark is to safeguard the artwork on exhibit. The growth of…
Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez is well-known in the Boston area for her curatorial projects and individual works in photography, installation, and more recently, performance. Atenea (2001), her mural-sized collage now on view at the Mobius Gallery, masterfully unites the themes of self-portraiture, storytelling, migration, and femininity that have come to define her current body of work. It is as if Vázquez Rodríguez gave expression to these ideas many years ago in a sudden, chaotic burst of energy that has taken time to percolate through her creative practice. The collage it is an honest and complex…