Allston Skirt to close its doors after nine years

Kevin Van Aelst constructs models of mathematical propositions out of food. (Kevin Van Aelst)

There's a tidal quality to the gallery scene in Boston. Many dealers sign multiyear leases; at times, many leases end all at once, and a huge shift occurs. That will be happening this summer.

The first casualty will be Allston Skirt Gallery. Owners Randi Hopkins and Beth Kantrowitz have decided that rather than make another four-year commitment to their Harrison Avenue space, they will shut their doors in mid-May, at the end of their upcoming exhibit of work by Jane D. Marsching and Deb Todd Wheeler.

"Our rent was going up," says Kantrowitz. "There was this moment where you stay, you leave, or you move. . . . It seemed we were forced to make a decision, and it was really hard and emotional for both of us."

It's a blow to the art scene here. In its nine years, Allston Skirt has become one of Boston's signature galleries. Kantrowitz and Hopkins created a space that is welcoming and not austere, a place to go and gab about art and look at work that is often fresh and sometimes funny.

When they opened, "Newbury Street was the model," Hopkins says. "I wanted this to be a place that felt more comfortable. I hope we've done that."

They've done that and more; this year, two of their artists have been nominated for the Institute of Contemporary Arts' Foster Prize: conceptual artists Joe Zane and Andrew Witkin.

Neither Hopkins nor Kantrowitz knows what she'll do next, but both say they intend to keep working with artists. John Kizer, who manages 450 Harrison Ave. for GTI Properties, says another art gallery will probably move into the Allston Skirt space.

Meanwhile, other galleries are on the move. Howard Yezerski plans to relocate from Newbury Street to 460 Harrison Avenue in the fall.

And Bernard Toale Gallery's Harrison Avenue space will be renovated and redistributed over the summer, according to Toale gallery director Joseph Carroll. Carroll plans to sign a lease for Carroll Inc. and will open a gallery in the fall. Toale will focus on consulting, operating out of an office and smaller gallery space there. Carroll will take over much of Toale's roster, including heavy hitters Laura McPhee, Ambreen Butt, and Abelardo Morell, while nurturing his own list of younger artists.

"It's terribly exciting," Carroll says. "It would be great if the economy were doing better, but you have to jump in when you can jump in."

Art that adds up
I'm math-phobic, so I approached "Math and Art," the group show at Axiom Gallery organized by George Fifield and Heidi Kayser, with the hesitation of the ignorant. Math can be intimidating, but even the most complicated math should not get in the way of the art it generates.

Kevin Van Aelst's light-hearted photographs in the front window provided quick relief. Van Aelst constructs models of mathematical propositions out of food. A fractal made out of Triscuits, such as the one depicted in "Sierpinski's Arrowhead," is somehow less imposing than one multiplying on a computer screen, or even drawn on a blackboard.

All the artists in this show find beauty in math. More than photography, metal, or video, it is their primary material, the source of dazzling forms.

Bathsheba Grossman designs her stunning little sculptures on the computer, and then generates the works - most of them are a mix of iron and bronze - with a 3-D, rapid prototype printer. What she makes is too structurally complex to sculpt using traditional casting methods.

The shapes are gyroids, defined in Wolfram's MathWorld as "an infinitely connected periodic minimal surface containing no straight lines." Soap film is a kind of minimal surface; interconnecting soap bubbles are gyroids. Grossman's "Quintrino," the size of a fist, is an airy, elegant knot of several five-pronged points forming a sphere.

Keith Peters invites the viewer to draw a personal solar system with his "Particle Emitter," a computer program in which you set up an emitter, and then suns and anti-suns to direct the trails of particles through space. It's more a fun, instructive video game than a work of art.

J. Michael James deploys fractals in a series of virtual sculptures, seen here in video projections. His "Scarabs in the Trees" are plump and glistening and seem to generate in an endless network of increasingly tiny bugs caught in the loop of a branch. Nathan Selikoff applies the Lyapunov exponent, which has something to do with perturbing a system, to make his digital print "Death Mask," which seems to exist in a space in which everything is stretched and shredded.

These last two artists rely too heavily on the visual punch of math; their works are more bells and whistles than they are substantive art, whereas Grossman and Van Aelst apply an aesthetic that has as much sophistication as wow factor.

Virtual work, real world
Turbulence.org, an agency that supports Internet art, has put together "Mixed Realities," an exhibition that exists in three worlds - in the virtual ones of the role-playing Internet game Second Life and the Turbulence.org website, and in the Huret & Spector Gallery at Emerson College.

I find the leap from real to virtual a struggle, and because this art is about that leap, the real-world versions come up short.

For "No Matter," Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott commissioned Second Life players to design sculptures, and invited real-world volunteers to make paper models of the sculptures. They are bright copies of iconic objects, such as a yellow submarine, but they're more like tokens than art.

"No Matter" delves into economies, both virtual and real. The designers and the builders were both paid with virtual money, which has some currency in Second Life, but none outside the Internet. I entered "No Matter" through Second Life, where I could "touch" an object and discover information about it, but the going was clumsy.

Jon Craig Freeman's "Imaging Beijing" invites the viewer to navigate through panoramic images of Beijing, over nodes that trigger audio of a young man's personal memories. It's an almost immersive experience, except that there's a stuttering quality to the virtual passage.

The concepts behind the "Mixed Realities" pieces are good, but bringing the dream of the virtual world effectively into a gallery is another matter entirely.