Ambitious and engaging show makes art of community
To properly experience ''Sifting the Inner Belt," at the Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery, you should go with friends who are ready to get their hands dirty. ''Sifting," spearheaded by Hiroko Kikuchi and Jeremy Chi-Ming Liu, is an ongoing, multipronged community event, and being there with a group catalyzes the work.
Going solo, you get mostly props and documentation, and you're less likely to engage with the pieces that invite a hands-on experience. For instance, I did not plant any weeds in the indoor gardens, despite the invitation to. Had I been there with a friend, someone to play with, I probably would have.
If weed-filled gardens sound like an oddity in an art gallery, consider that ''Sifting the Inner Belt" has for the past year conducted projects linking the Berkeley Street Community Garden with the BCA. The title of the show refers to the failed attempt to create a commuter beltway around downtown Boston; the initiative razed houses in the South End before it went belly up in 1971. The community garden sprouted up where the houses once were. Today, South End gardeners of many ethnicities grow plants there.
Kikuchi, Liu, and five other artists conducted interviews with local residents about gardening, growing, and the idea of community; held street performances involving bystanders; involved local businesses; and documented it all on the Internet (www.siftingtheinnerbelt.com). Some of the ongoing projects include Bitter Melon Week, July 22-30, during which many South End restaurants will offer dishes made with bitter melon, an Asian staple generally ignored in the United States; and the Nail Salon Exchange, which brings local manicurists into the gallery every Thursday and Friday, 4-8 p.m., to give free manicures to gardeners and anyone else who is interested. A ''Sifting" artist conducts interviews during manicures about hands, home, and growing.
''Sifting" is ambitious and has clearly threaded itself into the neighborhood with care. As a stand-alone exhibition, it's static, like a stage set after the play's been performed. The highlight is a pair of video monitors showing people tasting bitter melon and sweet melon. As they eat the bitter melon, they wince.
Despite the disappointment of viewing documentation rather than the art itself, the vitality of ''Sifting the Inner Belt" comes through. This is the most engaged community art effort I've come across, far more ambitious and sensitive than any mural project. These artists didn't set out to empower their subjects by teaching them to make art; rather, they went in as social researchers, sought to learn from the community they worked in, and created art that honors that community.
One more time
Here come the summer group shows. ''The Repetitive Mark" at Gallery NAGA celebrates that particularly obsessive kind of artist who creates work by doing the same thing over and over again, thousands of times. The process becomes a kind of meditation; the product, when made well, can be breathtaking in its sense of infinitude.
Reese Inman uses algorithms to create software that generates patterns of colored dots, which she prints out, adheres to a large panel, and paints over, sands, and paints over -- again and again. The result looks like a computer motherboard, flickering with circuits of colored dots. It's a lovely conflation of the perfection of math and the imperfection of painting. Jessie Morgan builds gesso ridges over the surface of her pieces, paints, then traces those ridges with pencil. The washes of tone feel ethereal, but the texture is like furrowed land.
Elizabeth Cheek applies a layer of paint, a layer of translucent medium, then another layer of paint; it's like one painting floating over another, with her rhythmic marks in each layer working in counterpoint. Janice Handleman draws tiny repeating gestures to make a larger pattern; ''Circle (Vortex Black)" puts you in the eye of a hurricane.
Masako Kamiya exhibits her trademark style of building up tiny spots of gouache into veritable stalks, making work that bristles with color. Furniture maker John Eric Byers scores circles and hash marks into his cabinets and benches, creating gestural designs that feel both rustic and sharply contemporary.
Range of motion
Victoria Munroe Fine Art's drawing show ranges from the minimalist shapes and luscious gloss of Joan Waltemath's mathematical renderings of interior spaces to Katya Slive's pulsating pools of concentric watercolor circles. Christine Hiebert makes tense, linear networks with blue tape, simple but charged with fierce energy. Walter Pashko's drawings balance that linear tension with soft, velvety smudging and other effects to make emotionally complex abstractions.
Craig Stockwell works like a jazz musician, improvising phantasms over a set structure. His grid of circles gets colored in and outlined; forms belly out or shoulder together, and the tones fill in the mood. Kendra Ferguson is better known as a sculptor. Her diagrammatic trapezoidal drawings in pristine red ink on handmade paper vary slightly, one from another. They feel solid -- she says she saw after making them that the shape echoes that of her shoulders and upper arms -- yet reflective, deeply internal, and, like a person from moment to moment, similar, but never quite the same.
Sifting the Inner Belt
At: Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St., through July 31. 617-426-8835. www.bcaonline.org.
The Repetitive Mark
At: Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury St., through July 29. 617-267-9060. www.gallerynaga.com
Drawing Salon
At: Victoria Munroe Fine Art, 59 Beacon St., through July 23. 617-523-0661. www.victoriamunroefineart.com.
