Heavenly creatures
The DeCordova’s must-see 2003 Exhibition
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
The 2003 DeCordova Annual Exhibition
At the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln, through
August 31.
I carried the catalogue of the DeCordova’s 2003 Annual Exhibition around
with me for days without looking at it in an effort to honor my rule that a
first impression of a work of art should not come through a reproduction. It
was tough. The museum’s annual group show, now in its 14th year, has established
itself as one of the premier exhibits to introduce the most accomplished New
England artists to a wider audience.
Ultimately I did succumb to reading the catalogue’s cover, which lists
the names of this year’s participants, and I was impressed. I recognized
a half-dozen as some of the most talented visual artists in the Northeast; the
others, as it happens, are just as good. This year’s Annual qualifies as
a must-see.
The first works visible along a relatively narrow corridor
on the second floor at the DeCordova are Morgan Cohen’s sedate, colorful,
sexy, and borderline-abstract photographic C prints of ceiling corners, ironing-board
covers, drains, and pipes. Cohen is a maximal minimalist: he zeroes in on what
most of us regard as the most lifeless parts of our domiciles and discovers
grandeur. His frames feel like Henry Higgins presenting Eliza Dolittle in the
ball scene of My Fair Lady; they have a kind of aristocratic humility.
I’d seen Cohen’s work before in a solo show at Gallery Naga last year,
and I was impressed then by both his technique and his compositional acuity.
Not many people can make those recesses where spiders and cobwebs dwell feel
libidinous. At the same time, I was a little on guard, afraid that for all their
gentle appeal, his spacy, washed-out, triangulated images might become predictable
or antiseptic or both.
Silly me. Cohen’s most recent work — nearly half of his 22 pieces
on display at the DeCordova date from this year — explores new directions
and demonstrates his sharp eye, contemplative attitude, and artistic integrity.
He uses light in such a way that, no matter what surface he’s shooting
(metal, paint, or porcelain), it suggests human skin. In his more recent imagery,
he has broadened his range of color and texture. In one particularly noteworthy
frame, Ironing Board, he allows for an almost palpable texture and an asymmetrical
pattern of lines.
Also on the second floor, a room is given over to the nine diminutive, kinetic
sculptures by Steve Hollinger and a small set of 3-D objects, also by Hollinger,
that don’t move. The first items you see on entering the space are Leaf
Boxes, a set of meticulously crafted, business-card-size lidless boxes made
out of the dried, pressed leaves of deciduous trees. Some stand on the stilts
of the leaves’ stems; others rest flat on their leaf bases. All enchant.
Looking at them reminded me of the time when, hiking through a field of tall
grass in upstate New York, I almost stumbled upon a newly born fawn. Articulate,
refined, and vulnerable (a breath could blow them away), the Leaf Boxes serve
as an apt introduction to Hollinger’s kinetic pieces. The artist imposes
stasis on them in a way that complements the imposition of movement on his other
works.
In Bat, Hollinger has positioned the white, gossamer skeleton of a small bat
— its wings resemble the veins in a leaf, thin as thread — in a clear
aqueous solution. The bat is connected by nearly invisible filaments to a small
pole floating at the top of the tank, like the beam connecting a marionette’s
strings to its operator. When you press the foot pedal at the base of the stand
on which Bat rests, a light goes on behind it, heating tiny solar panels that
you can’t see. Slowly, the creature’s wings begin to undulate as the
bat rises to the upper portion of its aquarium. It’s magical, in the way
that a Victorian music box appears magical — its crude sophistication makes
it seem simultaneously antique and futuristic.
Hollinger’s other works include Sentinel, in which an eye rotates in a
peephole, Fiddler, in which a miniature man mimics playing an instrument, and
Butterfly, a piece that looks like something Arthur Ganson might have made,
in which the insect’s wings are set in flight-like motion. His most fully
realized creation, however, is Jellyfish. It’s made of wires and glass
and God knows what else, and its solar panels make it react to light, so that
the clear tentacles of its skirt — weighed down by colorless, crystal disks
the size of a cell-phone button — rise and fall in dreamy waves.
The other major highlights of this year’s Annual are also works in three
dimensions, by Jennifer Maestre and David Cole. Maestre’s technique is
as zany as it is effective; she takes tiny pencil stubs, sharpens them until
they could draw blood, drills an infinitesimally small hole through them, and
then strings them together to create a kind of chain mail that she shapes into
freestanding upright pieces. She plays the pointedness of her pencils’
tips against their flat ends where either the erasers have been worn smooth
or the wood itself has been sheered flat to expose the graphite center.
The foot-tall Inanna, for instance, made me think of a cross between a geode
and a Venus’s flytrap, with suggestions of vagina dentata; it looks as
if it could swallow your hand. Say ‘A’ suggests a tongue sticking
out of a mouth with the miniature graphite spikes as needle-sharp taste buds.
Maestre’s abstract, discomforting confections — they all imply mutant
sea urchins that have been trained to attack — frequently refer to the
body, though not necessarily the human body. Springtime Tall Tale looks like
an armored penis (armadillo?); Echinimunculus has the shape of a pregnant sloth.
Humorous, weird, tactile, and strangely refined, Maestre’s art turns out
to be unexpectedly faceted, charged, and complex.
Unexpectedly faceted, too, is David Cole’s installation of a 14-foot-tall
(and wide and deep) Fiberglass Teddy Bear woven out of close to a ton of commercial-grade
fiberglass insulation. It’s huge, it’s pink, it’s in the form
of a teddy bear, and it doesn’t come across as cynical or gimmicky or precious,
the way Jeff Koons, for one, always does. Instead, Cole’s massive teddy,
in all its ludicrous dimensions and material, suggests a statue of the Buddha
— made out of cotton candy. Part prankster and part priest, Cole’s
joke gives way to awe.
The one video installation in this year’s Annual, Bruce Bemis’s Mending
Mid-Oceanic Rift, shares some of the Jules Verne aspects of Steve Hollinger’s
art. Bemis begins with two old-fashioned polished chrome film projectors that
run simultaneously. He’s manipulated the machines by adding several spokes
to them so that the two film loops must arc over what look like a pair of five-foot-wide
Ferris wheels. What’s on the film loops is identical but slightly out of
synch, a family swimming underwater in a pool; it looks like a home movie from
the ’50s in black and white. Instead of being pointed toward a wall, the
projectors are aimed at a bright chrome ball the size of a basketball, with
the result that the swimming bodies fill the space of the surrounding walls
and ceiling. It’s a delightful work, a celebration of naïveté.
Other good entries in the show include the gender-bending portrait paintings
by Hannah Barrett, large, abstract sculptures made of welded spikes by John
Bisbee, and the colorful, complicated, abstract installation of shaped boards
by Hather Hobler-Keene. Jane Masters’s accomplished, intricate drawings,
Lars-Erik Fisk’s reshaping of a Volkswagen into a sphere, and Laura McPhee’s
seven atmospheric color photographs taken in Calcutta complete the exhibit.
Issue Date: June 13 - 19, 2003
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/arts/art/documents/02940681.asp