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Brutalism is arguably one of architecture’s most challenging styles. This mid century aesthetic is typified locally in buildings like Boston’s City Hall, built in 1968, and the campus of Southeastern Massachusetts University (now University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth), which was completed in phases from 1966-1971. These buildings are striking in their richness of texture, complexity of design, and the assertive face they turn to the world. Architects working in the Brutalist mode eschewed the glass curtain walls and cool steel of their contemporaries and embraced structures molded out of concrete that…
Xu Bing: Phoenix, currently on exhibit at MassMoCA, is poetic and political. The artist’s beautiful installations make a traditional artistic statement at first glance. However, an unexpected use of materials gives these works deeper meaning, with insight into Xu’s personal history as well as commentary on the cost of continual economic growth in the artist’s home country of China. Issues of capitalism, labor and consumption frame the exhibition, as these works have an elegant, strong conceptual background. Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer is confronted by Background Story 7, a seemingly…
Welcome to the next installment of Studio Sessions with guest Melissa Murray. Melissa earned her BFA from the State University of New York Purchase College in 2006. Her mixed media pieces often place highly-refined drawings of wild animals into interior or urban settings. These scenes are reflections of places that are part of Melissa’s life. Her most current series focuses on a vacation home in Cape Cod that has been in her family for decades. Listen as Melissa describes these places that inspire her and explains how she chooses to present them…
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: • Exhibitions Monday June 3 — Thursday August 8 Montserrat College of Art, Montserrat Gallery, 23 Essex Street, Beverly, MA Seven: A Performative Drawing Project Seven artists who are invited to draw directly onto one of seven walls in the Montserrat Gallery, over a seven-week time frame, June 3 — August 8. Each artist participating in this exhibition will individually contribute work to one of the…
By Stephanie Cardon June 17, 2013 This conversation with John C. Gonzalez followed his participation in Odd Spaces, last month’s day-long performance art event at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, curated by Liz Munsell. With Family Meal Gonzalez initiated a collaboration with two of the Museum’s cooks, Hamilton Luna Alvarez and Jodeson Francisco, each of whom prepared a dish which held cultural and personal significance to them to add to the day’s menu. The cafeteria served arepas for lunch, a Venezuelan classic, while the dining room offered a three course prix…
The Columbia historian Eric Foner has written that freedom in today’s neoliberal world is largely defined by “a series of negations—of government, of social responsibility, of a common public culture, of restraints on individual self-definition and consumer choice.” In the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s exhibit Freedom at Brown University’s Granoff Center, these negations are formally and conceptually manifest. A collection of porcelain Madonnas is blotched with white paint, a cigarette dangling from the mouth of each. A life-size model of Humphrey Bogart gets a similar treatment: painted white face, drips of red…
You’ve stumbled across some sort of back alley entrance to a virtual digital theatre. The digital back lot that makes screen stare-stumblers of us all. There is something overwhelmingly familiar and disorienting in Derek Larson’s piece. Can one call this a sort of virtual actual blueprint? A bizarre querying and memorial reminder of this inter-networked optics within our connected screen culture: a frenzy1 of digital dream space, synchronized and interfacing, blindly projecting a bizarre circus of cybernetic cloud consciousness? It appears artificially grotesque and yet the screen projection interface that Larson…
i. Experience We are fascinated by this word “experience.” Just how to describe it? Something which cannot be touched by description, documented by exposure, or reduced by critique. You weren’t there… Experience is a lodestone of authenticity. The word keeps us out: we know that something strange and exciting has happened to someone, so exciting or remarkable that the person in question cannot delineate its components across ordinary language. This is to mean that what has happened must have had superior reality, beyond the pale of compromised and mediated experience. Excuse me:…