Newest Features
What happens when an artist retreats? I don’t mean to some plush residency program with three square meals and unfettered studio time, free from the worries of everyday life, but retreats by building up defensive walls to buttress against social and political forces. Mark Dion seems to be asking this very question with his encapsulated, somewhat autobiographical, installation The Octagon Room, which has been recently recreated at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, MA. Dion presents the viewer with a retrospective scenario as to what happens to…
What is queer photography? Do we know it when we see it? Or does the definition hold a certain slippage, the paradox of any deconstructive category? By the late 1980s, amidst a mounting backlash from conservative political factions, photographers were doing it more and more. Charting new territory in their representations of sexuality, they created queer imagery, not as a risque indulgence for the heterosexual eye, but as a field of art, scholarship, and activism in its own right. Queer image-makers, working in the wake of Robert Mapplethorpe’s much-maligned 1989 NEA-funded exhibition…
In David H. Wells’ Foreclosed Dreams at Providence’s Yellow Peril Gallery, we see the material residue of dreams deferred, if not entirely scuffed out. The photographs, presenting a kind of archeology of the recent past, document houses in limbo, interior spaces gone to seed. Wells captures the home’s transition from the center of private life, a symbol of middle class stability, to one of derelict abandonment. And with the careful attention of an archaeologist, his images reveal a richly textured materiality: the wrinkled surface of packing tape, grout, particles of dust,…
]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 Friday June 14 — Thursday August 15* Raul Gonzalez, Every step you take is forever Essex Art Center, Elizabeth A. Beland Gallery, 56 Island Street, Lawrence, MA Every step you take is forever A site-specific installation by Raul Gonzalez with soundtrack by dieRadio Opening Reception: Friday June 14 5-7pm with artist talk at 5pm / Free Friday June 14 — Saturday July 28 Nathaniel Hartman,…
By Katrina Umber June 11, 2013 Going through my notebooks, and bookshelves, the words and images I continue to carry with me… Books! The first place I encountered good art was in the art stacks at the public library. How I love books! I will share with you words and images, my own and those of others, that have shaped my thinking and art making. Alexander Rodchenko, Portrait of Mother,1920. In a scrapbook made by Katrina Umber in her early twenties. “Read. Read something else. Go back to the first thing and…
If you’re in the mood for Neo-Victorian drag iconography torn from the pages of comic book fantasies (and, let’s face it, who isn’t?), then Dress Up should be your next destination. On view now through September 10 at Panopticon Gallery, this exhibition takes performativity, performance, and change-of-clothes identity categories as its fodder for play. And the play’s the thing! You might just find yourself feeling surrounded by a cast of actors in line for the next make-or-break audition, but the heightened sense of amusement and plain old good fun is catching.…
This First Friday, the ICA Boston hosts a special event to kick off the summer featuring artist-designed mini golf greens by Maria Molteni and Pat Falco, as well as a new Pop-Up Oyster Bar. Stick around for tours of their current exhibitions as well as a sign-painting demonstration inspired by the work on view in Barry McGee. Or you could head to the South End and over to the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery to see Anna Von Mertens’ recent work GOLD! AND OTHER FALLEN EMPIRES, open until 9pm.…
With the end of Big Red & Shiny’s first academic year quickly approaching, we’ve been taking stock of the past 8 months to identify our successes and re-evaluate where we’d like to have a larger impact. One part of our mission has always been to highlight new voices within our cities—emerging artists who are bringing exciting ideas and techniques to their mediums or those who may just be graduating into our arts scene. Around this time every year we are provided with some of these best new voices and, given the…