Humor drives 'Free Parking' exhibit

Kirsten Mosher's ''Free Parking'' show starts with a two-lane road made with reflective tape that runs through Mills Gallery. (John Horner Photography)

I spend a lot of time in my car so like it or not a good chunk of my consciousness is taken up with driving: traffic jams, where to turn, whether a light will turn red soon.

That's the stuff of Kirsten Mosher's surprising and funny exhibit "Free Parking" at the Boston Center for the Arts' Mills Gallery. Mosher sees the car as an extension of the self. Her conceptual art show starts with a two-lane road made with reflective tape that runs across the BCA Plaza and up into and through the gallery, a fun piece that lays out the imaginative parameters of the exhibit.

In the video "Free Parking," Mosher delves into the existential hell of a massive parking lot. With her camera on the dash, she pulled into and out of dozens of empty spaces. A monologue runs through the 18-minute video, in which Mosher reflects on this experience - "my parking makes me invisible; nobody notices that I am parking and not getting out" - and driving in general.

She took out classified ads in the automotive sections of newspapers and placed little narratives there: "The first thing about driving that scared me was going up a hill. Just before you get to the ridge, it looks like there isn't any more road. . ." In such works as these, she comically deconstructs the dialectic of driving, a whole apparatus of ideas and knowledge that anyone driving for more than a month takes for granted.

"Carmen Blueprint" is a diagram of a car costume you can make from cardboard; in a series of photographs, someone wearing the costume walks, stooping, through a crosswalk. It's a silly scene, but it effectively pokes fun at the way we identify with our vehicles.

Mosher doesn't address road rage in "Free Parking," I realized as I drove away from the exhibit and another driver cut in front of me. That topic in itself would be enough for an entire exhibit.

Sean M. Johnson's photographs and videos in "A Family Portrait," also at the Mills Gallery, explore homosexuality and how parents, specifically fathers, can play a part in shaping a gay man's desire. His color photographs are witty. Images of full-grown, shirtless men bobbing for apples imbue an innocent game with sexual content, but still seem sweet. Two charming pictures titled "Beard Washing" depict men wearing towels in a bedroom with Victorian-era decor watching with conviviality as one washes his beard in a basin. It's an odd ritual, both manly and intimate.

Johnson's videos disappoint. I did not sit through the entire 25 minutes of "Paul, Daddy and I," in which the artist probes his sexual proclivities while rubbing another man's feet (ultimately, they become sexually involved), because what I did see was narcissistic and visually static. "Josh and I Build a Tent" was less onerous - it's only five minutes long, and there's no self-involved monologue. Two men smooch under a tent of floral-patterned sheets. As in the apple-bobbing photos, there's an endearing connection between sexuality and child's play, but this would have been a more effective still photo.

Finally, conceptual artist Dave McKenzie, who last year had the dreamlike video "Present Tense" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, has a single painting in the Mills Gallery's project room. "This Is a Proposal" is true to its word, a proposal in block text. The proposal is benign enough; as a painting, it's more intimate than many other text-based works, such as those of Jenny Holzer. The canvas is small; the proposal suggests a one-to-one relationship between artist and viewer. Or perhaps it's between painting and viewer; that would be wonderfully apt.

World on a string
"String Theories" is an ambitious show put together by outgoing curator James Manning at the New England School of Art and Design Gallery at Suffolk University. There's a handout in which Washington Taylor, an MIT physics professor, explains string theory, an overarching hypothesis of how the world works. It posits, among other things, that an electron is a loop, not a particle.

The four artists in this show make art that springs from their contemplations of string theory; an understanding of physics is helpful to view it. Keith Francis's crisp paintings of the tracks of subatomic particles, such as "Blue Sea," look like the embodiment of cool jazz. William Frese's alluring video "Vibration Landscape" shows a tarp flapping in the wind; the wind echoes, in string theory, how vibrations can change the form of the loops. Lou Cohen's haunting synthesized audio complement to the video matches musical components to those of string theory; a short pulse of sound, for instance, is equivalent to a tiny string.

Painter Paul A. Andrade devotes several canvases to contemplations of extra dimensions, parallel universes, and multi-universes, all part of string theory. They're mounted in a complex loop: on the floor, on the wall, making odd associations to one another. Singly, the abstract paintings verge on the mundane, but together they make a surprisingly witty installation.

Correction: Because of a reporting error, the Galleries column in Wednesday's Food & Arts section mischaracterized the content of two videos by Sean M. Johnson. In one, Johnson is seen having his feet rubbed by another man, but the two do not become sexually involved. In another, two men nuzzle, but do not kiss.