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Every week, BR&S picks out a series of gallery events, screenings, exhibitions, performances. Here are our choices for you to go & see this week: • • • Events • • • Thursday October 3 Brandeis University, Mandel Center for the Humanities, #303, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA Print Culture: Past, Present, Future The event brings together scholars, critics and editors to reflect on the history of the magazine, the intersection of visual and print culture, and the status of the periodical today. The first panel, on periodical studies, features Ann Ardis,…
I have started making new pieces in a similar vein to Hidden Marriage addressing our peculiar tendency to view man-made as unnatural. It’s a bit like saying that the castes worms make in the soil are artificial. Man-made is, after all, a subset of rather than a separate category from nature-made. I feel an abhorrence for plastic things in an otherwise pristine setting, but it is an aesthetic snobbery not a mystic, universal-truth-derived sense of wrongness. If you go down to the woods today. So I have obtained (from a trip to…
By The Editors September 30, 2013 We at Big Red are feeling especially shiny this Monday morning, and it’s all because of you. Hundreds of you came out to The Mills Gallery at the BCA last Friday night to celebrate our first year back from hiatus at the Big Red Shindig. The party was epic, with music from by Jesse Kaminsky, Wayne and Wax, el Oxycontinental, and visual overload by HEXbeam, as well as art by Susan Metrican, JR Uretsky, Anthony Palocci Jr., Johnny Adimando, Robin Mandel, Jesse Kaminsky, Nabeela Vega, Jeff…
BR&S’s editors are beginning a regular blogpost highlighting events and exhibitions we’ve seen and enjoyed, but, for any number of reasons, weren’t able to cover. Usually, that reason is time; we feel fortunate to live in a city where there are enough powerful and interesting art events for us to feel challenged to see or review them all. So without further ado, we bring you: Tony Feher at deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park May 24 to September 15, 2013 My most recent art crush has to be Tony Feher. Like other…
In retrospect, it seems only fitting that I should see Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s video installations at the Davis Museum. It’s been years since I last uttered the words “esse is percipi,”1 but those conversations (arguments, really) involving Bishop Berkeley and poor, misguided Samuel Johnson’s rock had started long ago on that verdant campus. If, since then, I’ve wondered how a degree in philosophy might prove useful, Ahtila’s first major US exhibition, the very one to bring me back to Wellesley College all these years later, provides the answer. But that may…
Omer Fast’s 30 minute video work 5,000 Feet Is the Best takes its title from one of the lines in its dialogue. It is spoken by a jumpy former U.S. Air Force Predator Drone operator, reclining on a bed in a Las Vegas hotel room. He is being interviewed by a journalist, but not a real journalist. And he isn’t really a retired drone pilot either. He’s an actor. We know this. We know we are watching fiction because we are sophisticated viewers, accustomed to recognizing the tell-tale signs of a slippage…
Every week, BR&S picks out a series of gallery events, screenings, exhibitions, performances. Here are our choices for you to go & see this week: • • • Events • • • Thursday September 26 The Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square (161 Essex St), Atrium, Salem, Ma 80 Days: A Steampunk Celebration 6:30-9:30pm / Members & Salem residents free (with ID) | nonmembers $10 / Pay at the door. • • • • • • • • • • Thursday September 26 MassArt, 11th floor, Tower Building, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston…
It turns out that, while I wasn’t looking, my brain made me do things I had not intended. Back at the beginning of the year I was doing a residency in North Carolina working on a collaborative new media piece with my husband for a local children’s hospital. We had been thinking (or ‘constructively arguing’) about the theme of this piece for a long time, at least a year, ever since we knew we were going down to Charlotte. We wanted to make a Hero’s Journey, distilling the essentials out of fairy…