Words of art

Foster winner delivers with text

By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent  |  February 4, 2009

There's a photograph hidden in Andrew Witkin's exhibit at LaMontagne Gallery. It's a print made from a digital photo of a scan of a Polaroid, and it depicts, in case you can't discern the image through so many generations, a dried rose. Witkin has placed a list over it, bits of text responding to "Nuestros Desaparecidos," a documentary about victims of political oppression in Buenos Aires: "faces of old friends," "no longer far away," "to be silent."

Witkin was awarded the Institute of Contemporary Art's $25,000 James and Audrey Foster Prize last month; his work, along with that of three other finalists, is up at the ICA until March 1. The LaMontagne exhibit, called "Others Among Others" because Witkin invites collaboration, makes a lovely companion to his ICA installation. Both are visually spare, freighted with tenderness and the constancy of loss.

The installation here - chairs and tables made of birch plywood, scraps of old papers, a pale pile of alabaster, stones, ping-pong balls, cork, a stereo playing versions of an old folk song, and three racks of 144 cotton T-shirts, each stamped with text - is terrifically unassuming.

That's partly because Witkin wonders, in his work, where his daily life meets his art. The text on the T-shirts comes from the artist, from his friends, and from his reading. As it says on one of the T-shirts, "What's for public and what is private? Of private, what should be referenced or pointed out as existing/exciting?"

The private, of course, is the source of the rich undercurrent of emotion indicated in music and text here more than in imagery. Another T-shirt says "group photo but with description of only one person." Then there's "little bits of bitterness about the ending." It's not all on the cusp of sentiment; there's also "ironing board." The T-shirts read, all together, like a poem, a gradual, resonant accrual of images and ideas.

That hidden image of the rose - not a live rose, but a dried one - suggests such a depth of feeling that it must be held at a distance to even begin to comprehend it. That gulf between feeling and understanding is this artist's terrain. His careful mapping of that terrain, in which he hides roses rather than foisting them upon us, leaves room for us to chart our own private emotional topography. That's why Witkin's art has power: It's capacious, welcoming, and sad.

The painter Sedrick Huckaby's grandmother, called Big Momma, is the star of his exhibition at Nielsen Gallery. Huckaby spent time visiting her during her final illness last year, painting her portrait. In "I'm Pressing On," she wears a bright, florid outfit that is a painter's dream, and her soulful face, the folds of her skin, and the very weight of her flesh shine in the artist's layers upon layers of paint. It's as if he didn't want to just capture her image; he wanted to somehow re-embody her, to not let her go. The day she died, Huckaby's child was born.

Huckaby also paints himself, and most remarkably, quilts made by both of his grandmothers, which he drapes in groups. He applies a virtuosic range of techniques, from gritty impasto to the delicate realism of the large "Quilt for Christ II," which depicts one of Big Momma's quilts, slouching and vibrant with crosses in the middle, bracketed by lengths of sheer pewter fabric that catch the light and veil more quilts beneath. Even with the realism, Huckaby brings us so close to the fabric that it nearly becomes abstract, monumental, and as enveloping as quilts should be.

They stand not just for familial love, but for a legacy of creation and for how both of those are grounded in spirituality and work, a stitch - or a dab of paint - at a time.

Beth Kantrowitz, one of the owners of the late, great Allston Skirt Gallery, which closed last year, kicks off her career as an independent curator with a small, elegant exhibit, "add and subtract," at Gallery Kayafas (at this writer's deadline, it was not mentioned on the gallery's website, but the show is indeed there). All four artists use additive or reductive techniques. The exhibition is all in shades of white with bits of gray and black, focusing the viewer on form rather than tone.

Helga Felleisen cuts designs from 18th-century embroidery into layers of translucent vellum, making ghostly work dense with delicate pattern. Mia Pearlman's cut-paper "HEMITROPE" is a fantastic, cyclonic structure bursting off the wall.

Roberta Paul added her own hand to her ailing father's in a poignant piece, tracing over a projection of his writing in gouache. He was mentally failing, and trying to make sense of Sept. 11, he scrawled "Before/after." August Ventimiglia offers a grid of small, obsessive drawings of white chalk on sandpaper, like nine blizzard views. The effect of the whole group is a bit like that of Witkin: quiet and unexpectedly intense.