Anna Kunz’s Venus harbors classical ambitions—not only in its name’s obvious mythological reference but in its sweeping aspirations toward spatial, painterly beauty. It was apropos then that during my visit to Providence College’s Reilly Gallery, a band recital could be overheard…
Corridors can be odd spaces in museums, heavily trafficked but not always experienced. Art mounted in these passages can feel like an afterthought. This was not the case with Caleb Cole’s Forget Me Not, recently on view at the Newport…
A green, furry fiend lingers in the center of A Brief Case, one of Stuart Diamond’s latest paintings. Behind this Grinch-like ghoul, the scales of justice teeter on an elephant trunk, imperiled. A curtain of flame sizzles in the distance.…
Providence artist Allison Paschke can be disobedient in museums. Sometimes, she’ll find a sculpture or object irresistible, and smooth her hand carefully over its surface. In her latest exhibit at AS220 Project Space, Paschke extends this “mischievous glee” to her…
In One Makes an Instrument of Themselves, and is Estranged Also, collaborators Mimi Cabell and Lindsay Foster probe the “the commercialized self, the marketized private life.” As today’s corporate landscape ostensibly reorients itself toward workers’ happiness, Cabell and Foster remind…
Taylor Clough’s Is, And of The at Occam Projects features an assortment of paintings on canvas and paper, absorbingly and tauntingly saturated. Clough painted people as an undergrad, but her current sceneries are unpopulated. Though lacking in figuration, she paints…
Pregnancy and parenting can create serious changes to an artist’s process. As installation maestro Sarah Sze elaborated on a 2012 exhibit in London: “The pieces in this show appear to measure space, or time, and now that I have two…
Jessica Deane Rosner can’t discuss the inspiration for her latest exhibit. It might suffice to say that, last September, she experienced a terrible and life-changing event. It forced Rosner to reconsider her self-concept as someone bold and brave. The aftermath…
A hole can be a portal, a passageway, a point of penetration, an injury, an orifice, a site of leakage. The holes in Linda Leslie Brown’s latest exhibit take the viewer not to Wonderland but a dumping ground. Unwanted items…
“Subtle, persistent revolt” is how GRIN owners and curators Corey Oberlander and Lindsey Stapleton describe their latest exhibit, Besides, on view through February 13. This succinct phrasing suggests small-but-continuous acts of resistance. The second installment in a two-part arc that…
Pills are talismans. They are tiny, portable and therapeutic, secular-but-sorcerous objects whose enchantments are swiftly and secretly invoked. Psychoanalyst Ernest Becker wrote, “Pills and pellets are forms of fetishes, ways of overcoming anxiety, the terror of the body, in a…