Expect the unexpected at
annual DeCordova show
By Chris Bergeron, Daily
News staff
Posted May 18, 2008 @
12:12 AM
For contemporary artists, creating original art
can be as exhilarating or precarious as body surfing through a rip tide.
Hug familiar shores and get stuck with the
crowd. Head into deep waters alone and risk never coming back.
Choosing materials as varied as bath towels and
brain waves, melons and memories, a dozen artists featured in the 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition have created provocative art
that challenges viewers mostly without drowning them in pretension or
obscurantism.
At its satisfying best, this show offers wildly
varied art that invites visitors to engage it intimately as active participants
rather than passive viewers.
Instead of just displaying it, several artists
ask your help finishing their work by becoming viscerally involved with it.
Vanessa Tropeano
shoots haunting minimalist photographs that draw you into her own family's real
and imagined history. Wearing lab coats, performers from The Institute for
Infinitely Small Things stage a theatrical inquiry in
Other artists transport you into new worlds
constructed from the unlikeliest materials.
Mitchel K. Ahern transforms
T-shirts and beach blankets into Zen-like riddles that subvert the everyday
slogans of advertising and politics. By scanning artists' and engineers'
brains,
They're just some of the exciting artists whose
work confounds predictable expectations by nudging or jolting you into fresh
ways of seeing.
Born in
Since 1989, the
Organized by curator Nick Capasso,
Director of Curatorial Affairs
Annual shows aren't typically organized over
"any single or over-arching theme," she said. For this exhibit,
several artists, Deitsch said, use performances to
examine connections between their works and viewers, traditional and
experimental materials and the self and its environment.
Deitsch described the exhibit as
"a broad snapshot" of cutting-edge work by artists from
Several exciting works, she said, reveal "a
certain excitement by artists playing with recognizable things and tweaking
them into something else."
In this show, Deitsch
said several artists create paintings, photos or performances that express
"incomplete or ambiguous narratives."
Others examine the "use of public
space" since 9/11 in different ways.
"There's a lot of
artists who work with performance. There are artists who translate the everyday
into something else," said Deitsch.
As Americans watch more "reality TV"
than news about Iraq, organizers seem to have chosen artists whose works goad
viewers into peeling back layers of artifice and contrivance to determine what,
if anything, is real.
As if slipping in and out of restless sleep,
Matt Brackett paints bold, even lurid scenes he calls "invented memories
fixed alongside the actual ones."
At twilight, a father and son hoist a mysterious
bundle with rope threaded over the limbs of a spectral tree. Perched atop a
cliff, a young man and woman in "Threshold" gaze across a rocky chasm
toward distant woods. In the ominous "Equinox," a strange man stands
in shallow water watching a rowboat holding a family of four drift toward a
swirling vortex.
As Brackett and his wife prepare for their first
child's birth, his striking unfinished scenes leave viewers suspended between
despair and possibility.
Born in
The Institute for Infinitely Small Things and
Ahern are showing cutting edge artwork that defies simple definition.
Comprising five to 20 members at any time, The
Institute is showing a multilevel street performance through the opposing
mediums of a video and an interactive "New American Dictionary" in
which the right to define words appropriated from the war on terror is
auctioned on eBay.
Carrying blatantly suspicious "unmarked
packages" through Chicago, institute members solicit strangers' thoughts
on public security, paranoia and racial profiling in a deadpan, funny video.
Earnestly sincere people spout an unsettling goulash of post-9/11 slogans that
seem bereft of original thought. As a thought-provoking counterpoint, The
Institute has published its Orwellian "New American Dictionary" that
advertises itself as "The Voice of Authority." Printed in bright
colors like the Random House Dictionary, it contains empty spaces for readers
to define words like "water boarding," "Freedom fries" and
"regime change." It also carries politically charged definitions of
familiar phrases like "Terror" which can mean "extreme
fear" or "a barrier to transcend on the road to freedom and enlightenment."
Ahern is showing two very different works that
seem to have sprung from a singular fascination with textiles and the printed
word. For a 60-foot-tall installation hanging above the second-floor stairway,
he has created two parallel versions of Jack Kerouac's famous scroll manuscript
of "On The Road" from a bolt of muslin with
linocut prints showing the original and edited text.
For a companion installation, he has hung
several towels and shirts bearing images and epigrams, such as "You own
you," "Only a drill," "Blue states secede" and
"This is your war on drugs."
Describing his work, Ahern wrote: "I seek
balance on the teetering edge..."
That's sound advice for enjoying this
challenging, exciting exhibit.
THE ESSENTIALS:
The 2008 Annual Exhibit runs through Aug. 17 at
The DeCordova Museum and
Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday
through Sunday, and on selected Monday holidays.
Admission is $12 for adults, $8 for seniors,
students and youths age 6 to 12. Children under age 5,
The
Guided tours of the museum's main galleries take
place at 1 p.m. Thursday and at 2 p.m. on Sunday. Free tours of the
For further information, call 781-259-8355 or
visit the Museum Web site at www.decordova.org.
Meet the artists
The following artists will discuss their work on
selected Saturdays at 3 p.m.:
May 31: David Prifti
June 21: Vanessa Tropeano
July 19: Matt Brackett
Several artists will give performances on
selected Saturdays or Sundays:
May 24: The Institute for Infinitely Small Things from noon to 2
p.m.
June 14: Mitchel Ahern at 3 p.m.
June 15: The Institute for Infinitely Small Things from noon to 2
p.m.
Aug. 16: Leah Gauthier at 3 p.m.