Bebe Beard and Liz Nofziger, two Boston-area video/installation artists with a talent for toying with viewers' responses to a venue's architecture, have thrown their lot together to create "Interventions and Objects," an exhibition at the New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University Gallery.
Kudos to NESAD interim gallery director Jim Manning for bringing Beard and Nofziger together for the first time in this delightfully disruptive show. Beard creates immersive environments, often with sound (for which she credits collaborator Lou Cohen); lately, animated gestures have powered her work. Nofziger can be slyer, hiding elements that surprise the viewer. She does that here, although she also doesn't hesitate to boldly get in her viewer's face.
This isn't exactly a collaboration. Each artist has mounted her own installation, and the two work beautifully against each other. Beard's piece, "Conflict," features mobiles with circles of coiled wire spinning and casting lulling shadows on the wall. There are also video projections on the walls and ceiling of wire animated by magnetic fields - it's like the graceful mobiles have shattered, and the shards, with minds of their own, are assailing each other.
There's drama in these shadows: Individual slivers of kinked wire, and sometimes small piles of it, approach a still clump of wires, then fall back, then come back with reinforcements and take a run at the larger grouping. This could be a military attack on a fortification, or it could be something milder; there's an element of teasing and seduction as well as jockeying for power in the simple movements of the wires. Cohen's soundtrack of gently scraping metal adds even more nuance and possibility to the story. One thing's for sure: The gestures, as they scrabble across the wall, are tense and wanting. "Conflict" is a piece about desire.
Beard's work is all scratchy black and white. Nofziger's installation, "Muscle," complements that with wild, warm, shimmery color. Nofziger has wrapped pink film around an oversized column in the gallery and adjoined to the nearest wall, creating a glowing wedge that impedes passage from one NESAD hallway to another.
The light from "Conflict" illuminates the gaudy, sleek "Muscle." Here's the surprise: If you keep watching, a video projection appears on the wall within the piece's span. A pink-gold light ripples downward, sliced down the middle by the shadow of the column, then disappears. That delicate light show turns a slick, obstreperous installation into an altarpiece.
Nofziger and Beard share a taste for the gently subversive. They should work together again.
In motion
"Moving Pictures," John Goodman's quickie photographic tour of the United States at Howard Yezerski Gallery, is aptly named. Even though you might see a still life or two among these smart gelatin silver prints, most of them have a sense of unstoppable motion, a thrust. They propel you from one to the next until - bam! One of them makes you stop.
There's "Carousel, Tulsa Rodeo," in which a white horse, mane flying, rears inside the gate before being released. Thanks to the precarious angle of Goodman's shot, the crowd seems to whirl around the horse. It hangs beside the crystal clear "Sand Mine Street, Oregon," a chiaroscuro image of the sun glistening on damp pavement, a distant car throwing long shadows toward a stop line and the word itself, "STOP," which brings us up short, as it should.
"Father's Day, Coney Island" couldn't be crisper; you can see the grains of sand on the beach blanket as a couple smooches, heads hidden beneath a towel. For all that clarity, there's an aching sense of urgency. Right next to that is the gorgeously textured "Blanket," empty and half-buried in the sand, still but filled with the suggestion of what has happened there.
Most of Goodman's photos move, suggesting a speedy ride through the country, giddily taking in country singers and ballet dancers. But it's those pauses that give the show its expressive rhythm.
On the street
Henry Taylor's paintings at Samson Projects have a documentary imperative. Taylor, a Los Angeles painter with family in Chicago (hence the show's title, "Chicago Kin"), wields a broad brush stoked with paint. He's a social realist and a pictorial memoirist, depicting homeless people he encounters, a man who robbed him, scenes from his childhood, and friends and lovers.
The brightly colored works have a nervous edge. In "Cruel Kids," he paints boys holding a toad under a water spigot; Samson Projects owner Camilo Alvarez says that when Taylor was small, his brothers would torment toads by holding them under hot water.
The portrait "Chicago Cous" shows a black man in dark glasses gripping a can; his white jacket, striped with green and blue, rivets the eye even as he disappears behind his shades. This seems to be Taylor's way of capturing a memory. The paintings are more like taut short stories than snapshots, ripe with emotion.
