Pilgrims, Feeling of a Feeling, and Art in the Age of the Internet Chuck Webster: Pilgrims: Drawings 2017-2018—Steven Zevitas Gallery The naivete in Chuck Webster’s work is misleading. What looks like pan watercolors and marker doodles on sheets of bond is shellac-based inks on vintage paper. The noodly line work comes from the […]
GALLERY REVIEWS 4.10.18
Playtime, Drawn, & Questions and Answers Playtime—Peabody Essex Museum You know that you’re in Playtime from the squealing emanating from one of Martin Creed’s two pieces in the show, Work No. 329 (2004). The installation, following the artist’s precise instructions to “fill latex balloons with half of the air in a given space […]
GALLERY REVIEWS 2.22.18
Inventur, Culture Hustlers, and Sandrine Schaefer Inventur: Art in Germany, 1943-55—Harvard Art Museums Five years in the making, Inventur examines German artistic production in the decade-plus of recovery after World War II. It takes its name from a Günter Eich poem that describes his meager belongings, including a “precious nail / I keep concealed […]
LIFE AS A HUNGRY GHOST
Extension Gallery’s 2018 season is off to a haunting start Extension Gallery has been quietly filling the gap in emerging art presentation in Allston that’s been left vacant more or less since Allston Skirt Gallery and Pan 9 went the way of all things (in these rapidly gentrifying lands). Its programming this year […]
GALLERY REVIEW: Annette Lemieux: Mise en Scène—Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
They barely move, but are distinctly not still, hovering above with all of the tension of a cat about to pounce—but never pouncing—on a mouse that is you.
GALLERY REVIEW: Joan Jonas: Ice Drawing—Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Enter through the Seeking Stillness exhibition if you can—Jonas couldn’t have asked for a better prelude to her work. The artifacts you first encounter in the darkened, theatrical Krupp Gallery greet you as if you were an archaeologist. They were used as tools for something, but what? The “what,” as it always is with […]
GALLERY REVIEW: The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766-1820—Harvard Art Museums
In the early days of the republic, the Philosophy Chamber at Harvard College housed an assortment of natural specimens, scientific instruments, and various objects of curiosity and delectation. This was a place to apprehend the logic of the universe and to ruminate on divine influence in the natural world. It was also a […]
GALLERY REVIEW: Steve McQueen: Ashes—Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
In 2002, Steve McQueen met a charismatic fisherman named Ashes in Grenada. When the British artist returned to the island eight years later, Ashes was dead, gunned down by a drug kingpin after the fisherman discovered a cache of narcotics on the beach. Ashes’ tale is the subject of a two-sided video installation […]
GALLERY REVIEW: Dana Schutz: Dana Schutz—Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
Dana Schutz has not yet painted a canvas that didn’t make me wish that I was looking at a Judith Linhares instead. That said, I’m glad I could see any Schutzes at the ICA, which wouldn’t have happened if it were up to some local busybodies bent on punishing her for her abortive Emmett […]
GALLERY REVIEW: Writhe & Resolve: Aspects of Arcadia—Matter & Light
Aristotle Forrester’s churning canvases take an abstract-expressionist attitude to an effort to depict Arcadia, the pastoral vision of harmony that has been a mainstay of the Western imagination since the Renaissance. This is an apt way to go about it in 2017, given that the details of such a place only ever seem to […]
