You wouldn't guess from the painting hanging in the front window of the Judi Rotenberg Gallery - a postcard-perfect painting of Mount Shasta, its snowy caps bathed in warm, peachy light - that there's a conceptual art exhibit inside.
Don't let that scare you off from painter Sean Micka's show. There are plenty of lovely, if standard issue, mountainscapes, alongside some dizzying, Op Art-style abstractions and an array of nuanced, absorbing, largely monochromatic paintings. The exhibit careens breathlessly from representation to abstraction, from picture to concept to retinal caress. Micka pulls it off with wit and daring, making startling associations along the way.
The mountains came first. Micka borrows images from old natural history magazines, and reincarnates the picture in paint. The idea isn't to capture the majesty of the mountain, but to examine stereotypes of natural beauty. Micka's technique imbues these images with freshness.
Micka then painted a series of color grids from a 1978 textbook explanation of the four-color printing process, also on view here, and from there he dove into abstraction, color's effect on the eye, and issues of perception.
With a nod to Josef Albers and Ad Reinhardt, he painted "Greenscreen," a series of four bright canvases bordered in white, like a photograph. Light and shadow appear to wash over the surface of "Greenscreen," but that's paint, not gallery lighting, creating a delicious sheen.
If this seems a far cry from "Mt. Shasta, California (Reader's Digest Scenic Wonders of America 1973)," it is. And it isn't. Look at the way the warm sunlight plays over the snow. Both works suggest depth; "Greenscreen" feels as if you could tumble into it, whereas "Mt. Shasta" depicts it via landscape. Even the hint at undulation achieved with subtle shifts in shadow echoes the mountain's shape.
As do the black-and-white striped canvases in the Op-Arty "The Fold (Binocular Disparity)," a diptych in which the lines peak and crimp. He undertakes a stereoscopic experiment, offering two similar canvases, close to mirror images, but not quite. It's stunning to look at; it threatens to short-circuit the brain.
This show succeeds partly because Micka opens a gateway into abstraction through landscape. His work is conceptually rigorous, but he makes it fun.
Magic box
"Inside the Box," an exhibition of dioramas curated by George Fifield and Phaedra Shanbaum at Howard Yezerski Gallery, is sometimes fun and often frustrating. Dioramas are like wee theaters; the combination of the small scale, narrative, and space can be enchanting.
The best works in the show capitalize on those elements. Robert Taplin's "Over the Dark Waters (Dante and Virgil Come to the River of Hell)," from a series depicting scenes from Dante's "Inferno," is about seven feet wide and bathed in blue light, with dozens of eerie, pale-green people contemplating the black river in the distance.
Jerry Williams had a show of dioramas at Genovese/Sullivan Gallery a couple of years ago, and exhibits the same works here: bright, brilliantly crafted dime-novel scenes full of humor and intrigue. Antony Flackett makes sly little black boxes with slots to peer into. Inside, the dioramas' sets are made simply, from cut paper and drawings. The tiny characters, such as Adam and Eve in "Morality Box," are reflections of a video projected onto acetate, but seem to inhabit the scene. Magic!
Suzie Silver and Hilary Harp couch videos inside layers of bucolic, leafy prints. The videos are re-enactments of performance art from the 1960s and '70s. Silver and Harp's work runs on a longing for an imagined utopia, a hunger no better satisfied 40 years ago than it is now, so the work feels empty.
Allison Holt's boxes revolve around the way the black-painted images on the plexiglass surface interact with the images within. These are sometimes effective and sometimes obscure. Empire S.N.A.F.U. is the alias of an artist whose art revolves around the supposed restoration of the works of a deceased visionary named S.N.A.F.U. It's all too bloated with mythology, and the work here, a tiny diorama in a giant contraption with a title too long to print, is also bigger and louder than its aesthetic worth.
Mapped out
The lyrical paintings, drawings, and collages of Carlos Estévez at the Boston Arts Academy grapple with faith and science. Estévez, a Cuban artist living in Miami, maps systems, overlaying charts of the cosmos with charts of the body or urban landscapes, tying disparate realms of knowledge into one miraculous clockwork.
"Portable Universe," for instance, starts with a foot's sole, like a massage map for foot reflexology. Estévez builds on that with collage and colored pencil, making pin-wheeling solar systems.
In many paintings, he works the ground with several layers of paint, creating a shimmering surface. "Oscillations of Faith" sets an acrobatic puppet on a tightrope over the spires of a city. Strings connect parts of her body; her head, filled with numbers, is disconnected. His paintings are uneasy, but somehow hopeful, if only because they are so beautifully crafted.
