Reflecting the here and hereafter

Meditation on mortality mixes media, symbolism

By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent  |  May 24, 2007

Some Buddhist monks meditate on death. They are instructed to imagine the decay of their own flesh. It's something most of us prefer to avoid thinking about.

Matthew Day Jackson stares death in the face in his cunning and imaginative show "Diptych" at Mario Diacono at Ars Libri. He pairs a mixed-media painting and a sculpture, each packed with art-history references and cultural symbolism.

This is the New York artist's stock in trade; he assembles symbols with such deftness and attention to craft that his art seems pregnant with meaning and magic, like objects made for sacred rituals. Much of his previous work has explored and critiqued American identity and history. "Diptych" leaves national issues aside to starkly ponder mortality, with the aid of Michelangelo and Constantin Brancusi.

The mixed-media work, "Disburdened Flesh," borrows from the Sistine Chapel's "Last Judgment," in which Michelangelo painted a self-portrait into the flayed, empty human skin carried by Saint Bartholomew. Jackson gorgeously depicts the skin in colored yarn nailed to a tree branch; a real rusty nail protrudes from the painting. The skin hangs vibrantly against a darkly stained wood panel, studded with stars of abalone and mother of pearl.

Before it lies what has been excised from that sack of skin. The sculpture, "Purgatorial Repose," is a chilling assemblage of wood and metal in the shape of a disjointed skeleton. Its head echoes Brancusi's sculpture "Sleeping Muse," a bronze head in sweet repose. But Jackson's version has glaring red eyes and a gaping hole. Spine and rib cage are burned wood. One hand is a cast skeletal bear claw wearing silver rings with various insignia and a quote the gallery attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: "What is to give light must endure the burning."

There's no pretty spin on Jackson's meditation on death. Regeneration is not at hand. Yet the accumulation of detail, references, and symbols both direct and obscure suggest that as harrowing as it is to contemplate death, there is meaning to be found there, if not solace.

Gideon Bok watches ordinary days pass inside his studio and lets them unfold in his paintings as riddles about space and time, illusion and reality, and relationships. In his show at Alpha Gallery, he deploys paint dexterously, swiping and dripping and soaking it into his linen canvas. A viewer's eye flashes between the scene the painter depicts and the paint itself; it's hard to commit to one or the other, and that's good.

Look at "Chopper, the Beast and Esteban's Drip." A couple sits on a sofa. The man is more solid than the woman; Bok clearly draws his head, hand, and foot. His body, though, is a watery gray wash, seeping into the black couch. The woman, barely outlined, disappears behind a boldly delineated guitar. A drip from the corner of the couch descends down the canvas and catches the eye of a dog, whose head appears twice as he follows the drip's path.

In most of Bok's paintings, many people come and go, grounding the works in community. But nobody appears in "Bent Ballroom at Eastland Park (Nude Overlap)," a canny piece in which Bok builds and deconstructs space all at once. The windows and the street scene outside appear more real than anything else. Inside, a painting propped against a wall looks like a magical doorway into another realm; traces of objects shimmer in the foreground.

Bok paints as he goes. He paints a box, then somewhere down the line the box moves, and on canvas that space gets painted over, but a hint of the box remains. It's as if he's trying to capture memories, and in so doing, he makes the present all the more illusory.

Photographer Joe Johnson's crisp, poignant cityscapes are devoid of people. They tell their stories with shadows, light, and little whispers of human presence, glimpsed through windows or in objects left behind. His show at Gallery Kayafas unfortunately repeats some photos he exhibited at last year's DeCordova Annual, but there are several lovely new pieces as well.

"Three Buildings" centers on a canyon of buttery light glowing among dark rooftops, like some kind of heaven opening up from below. The cool blue empty roofs sport the occasional skylight, windows to what's below. The sense of desertion and alienation is palpable until you glimpse in one corner the wheel and leg of a grill, and the suggestion that somebody occasionally ventures up.

"Compression" doesn't quite fit with the others, which focus on the interstices between two or three buildings. Here, Johnson gives us the big picture: rows and rows of buildings, rooftop jammed beside rooftop, lights shooting up from street after street, all rushing rhythmically toward a backdrop of high rises in the distance. It's a dramatic and kind of unbelievable shot, steeply pitched and dense. Reflected light twinkles in some of the windows. Johnson's other photos consider urban loneliness. "Compression," a picture of New York that Johnson shot from a roof with Lincoln Center at his back, is a shout-out to the glorious, bustling structure of the city.

Matthew Day Jackson: Diptych
At: Mario Diacono at Ars Libri, 500 Harrison Ave., through May 30. 617-734-1608, arslibri.com/MarioDiacono.htm

Gideon Bok
At: Alpha Gallery, 38 Newbury St., through May 30. 617-536-4465, alphagallery.com

Joe Johnson: City Pictures
At: Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Ave., through June 9. 617-482-0411, gallerykayafas.com