Revealing landscapes and the poetry of motion
A DVD of the 1999 Judith Wechsler documentary "Flora Natapoff" shows the artist drawing a landscape. She rides in a car through the English countryside, sketching the undulating hills as they fly by. The film is on view at Barbara Krakow Gallery alongside "Abstracts and Brief Chronicles," an engaging exhibit of Natapoff's expressionist collages.
Much of Natapoff's work has a similar sense of endless unfurling. It's a serial depiction of her experience of the land. Sometimes she creates that sense of succession in several pages of an artist's book. Sometimes it is in layers of a single collage. Either way, she captures both the depth and expansiveness of a given place, and a given moment in her imagination.
Natapoff will be familiar to some Boston art lovers; she lived here for several years in the 1970s and 1980s, before moving to London, and has exhibited with Krakow for 30 years. She suffers from multiple sclerosis , which has reined her in and perhaps made her gestures less generous. Looking at her work is an intimate experience, thanks to the smallish scale and the delights of paging through her artist's books, but don't be lulled by the scale. These collages crackle; with their sharp edges and painterly textures, they feint and dodge, then jab.
One untitled wall piece opens like a box of goodies. The pale grays and blacks of the container give way to bright yellow and red inside, yet for all the party intonations these edge into deep, painterly passages of blue-green. Despite the boxy feel, there's a spiraling quality to this collage, as if it opens only to point further inside, to hidden depths. Another one brackets a rocky collage, mingling sharp edges with fluid gestures, between two bold, smoky hieroglyphs.
Natapoff doesn't use collage like Rauschenberg, to juxtapose particular images; her work is too lushly abstract for that. Rather, the collage, with its sharply cut or ragged edges, and its built-up, almost three-dimensional quality, creates an architecture of feeling, built out of scraps of landscape and memory.
Flora Natapoff: Abstracts and Brief Chronicles
At: Barbara Krakow Gallery, 10 Newbury St., through July 28. 617-262-4490. barbarakrakowgallery.com
Motion Measured
At: Gallery Kayafas, 450Harrison Ave., through July 28. 617-482-0411. gallerykayafas.com
M.L. Van Nice: The Library at Wadi ben Dagh
At: Bromfield Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., through July 28. 617-451-3605. bromfieldgallery.com
In "Motion Measured," Gallery Kayafas presents works by Muybridge and Edgerton alongside three contemporary photographers whose art riffs or archly comments on theirs.
Thomas J. Gustainis follows Edgerton's milk-drop lead with "Geysers," in which he uses a strobe to capture water shot through the air; the droplets glow like gems against dark backgrounds.
Peter Urban uses Muybridge's backdrop of a string grid. The "motion" he traces is more spiritual than physical. In his diptych "The Living Symbol," the first image shows a soldier in desert camouflage, standing proud. In the next, he's gone, but his uniform crumples and bends back in the air. In Urban's works, people disappear like this, leaving the trappings of their identity suspended in the air, but "The Living Symbol" is the most freighted with loss.
In an unexpected twist, a homoerotic theme runs through some of the work. Muybridge and Edgerton both photographed male beauty, focusing on athletes. Muybridge's "Boxing, cross-buttocks" features boxers sparring in nearly invisible loincloths. Edgerton's "Gus Solomons" is a gorgeous shot of the dancer, in tights, raising his arms; the stop-motion photography makes it look as if he has wings.
Lazaro Montano runs with this theme in the darkly comic "Five Exercises." He's lifted images of men from gay erotica, and turned their sexual poses into calisthenics; often, but not always, he adds gym shorts. Like Urban, he sets his subjects against Muybridge's string grid. He's also assembled the prints in a grid, pinned to the wall like insect specimens.
Urban and Montano use the work of Muybridge as a springboard to explore contemporary cultural issues. Gustainis is more true to the stop-motion tradition. It's a clever mix of technical wizardry and ironic reflection.
Van Nice focuses on the blatantly unimportant, sending up how archiving, studying , and classifying things imbue them with solemn meaning. There's "Preliminary Studies of the Iconography of a Cheesit," set up like a display of butterflies, and "The Canon: Unfinished Study for an Account of Tedium," in which toothpicks take the place of letters in a giant book. Another unreadable volume is called " Journal of Ineffable Notions." These vividly recall tomes most everyone has had to slog through in school.
"Observations of a Commonly Overlooked Property of Air" displays several bottles and notes that air takes precisely the shape of the vessel that contains it. This turns out to be a metaphor for the whole show -- a lot of nothing in a well-considered and very funny container.
