At play in the halls of power
There's a decorum to maintain in the corridors of power, and that makes them easy to lampoon. Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom's video "Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg and Moore," on view as part of an office-themed group show, draws laughter, but there's more going on in this bold, endearing piece than just satire.
The artists observed the four titular attorneys in court and in meetings, recording their gestures and language. Carlson, a choreographer, then exaggerated those gestures and built a movement piece, which she staged in the wood-paneled hallway of a lawyers' office. The performers are the attorneys themselves, middle-aged and garbed in suits and ties.
The men stand in a circle, but they don't interact, although sometimes they move in concert. They squat and stretch; they float, arms out, like soaring hawks, then cup their hands and look searchingly into them. At one point, one of them swirls, points directly at the camera, and declares, "You are the biggest baby!"
The camera shows the group, then darts in and out for close-ups, almost making the viewer a participant in the dance. The men's faces seem unmasked. As they giggle and strut and ponder, they don't look like stone-faced or cunning lawyers, nor do they look like experienced performers (although they do occasionally perform this piece live). Rather, their expressions are vivid and sweet; they're having a blast. Strom and Carlson don't skewer these powerful men; they reveal the boys inside them.
Rebecca Chamberlain's drawings and Shellburne Thurber's photos, mounted on walls on either side of the video, set up a lovely rhythm. Chamberlain's shimmering, sharp works, made with ink drained from a Bic pen and brushed over nonabsorbent vellum, focus on modernist interiors. Sleek and monochrome, they glisten on the page. The crisp lines of furniture and architecture feel almost sterile, but the ink, in blue or purple-black, is freighted with emotion.
Most of Chamberlain's compositions jut out toward the viewer. Thurber's color photographs of psychoanalysts' offices pull you in. Ornamented by art prints or kitschy sculpture, these spaces aren't as forbidding as Chamberlain's, but there's something disturbing about their formulaic sameness, with the therapist's chair usually at the head of a day bed, and a box of tissues. If Chamberlain's scenes literally can't absorb the feelings washing over them, Thurber's photos stand at the ready with tissues.
Floating bricks
A probing meditation on painting, reproduction, and the urban landscape, Kelley Walker's two works at Mario Diacono at Ars Libri have a focus and beauty that was missing from the installation he mounted last year with occasional partner Wade Guyton at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Walker's a latter-day Warhol; in the past he has deployed corporate logos and offered his work to the public on CD files open to Photoshop manipulation.Here Walker relies on Warhol's old standby, the silkscreen. He scanned bricks and cinderblocks, and using color separation and silk-screening, he printed the scans and placed them in shifting, Mondrian-like grids on panels. They float over newspaper pages collaged in diagonals over the panels. The two untitled pieces strike a tension between city grit and the ease of producing iterations of prints, which are several steps removed from the actual brick and concrete he started with, yet also echo the process of building.
Dot matrix
Masako Kamiya's stubbly, colorful gouache works always remind me of the paper rolls studded with bright, sugar-candy dots I'd gobble up as a kid. She has a small show up at Gallery NAGA. Her technique hasn't changed, but it continues to captivate: She builds up tiny dots of gouache laboriously into colorful little stalks, bristling over the page or canvas.It's a great method with which to explore subtle palette changes, as she does in the snowy "Emergence," stippling her surface in the palest blues and pinks. Her smaller works on paper, such as "Transience," take a different tack. Here, fire-engine red lurks under pale pinks and yellows, like a fierce rash itching under a pastel blouse.
Like Kamiya, Stuart Ober paints incrementally. Ober, who also has a show up at NAGA, is a painter's painter; the joy in looking at his work is not so much in what he paints, but how he manages to build a rich, coherent image out of tiny smudges.
The result, in a piece such as "Sunflower Yellow," showing a paint spill on a Persian carpet, nods toward Impressionism - the works are wonderfully atmospheric - but is more solid. The school-bus yellow spill grabs the eye, but the most graceful moment in the painting is a passage of pale ivory and mauve below it that evokes the nap of the carpet and invites you to linger.
At Work: Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom, Rebecca Chamberlain, and Shellburne Thurber
At: Judi Rotenberg Gallery, 130 Newbury St., through Oct. 6. 617-437-1518, judirotenberg.com.
Kelley Walker
At: Mario Diacono at Ars Libri, 500 Harrison Ave., through Oct. 3. 617-734-1608, www.arslibri.com/MarioDiacono.htm
Masako Kamiya: New Paintings Stuart Ober: Mistakes, I’ve Made a Few
At: Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury St., through Oct. 6. 617-267-9060,
