Moving experiences
Changing times for art spaces, from Boston to Lincoln
The game of musical chairs continues for Boston-area galleries. With several leases ending, galleries are on the move or closing.
Over at Miller Block Gallery, Ellen Miller put the kibosh on rumors that she and Katie Block are parting ways. They are, however, restructuring the business. The gallery will move this summer from 14 Newbury St. to another space on the first block of Newbury Street; Miller won't say where. She will oversee the new gallery space, and Block plans to run the website and represent the space at art fairs. Their current lease runs through June. Miller plans to mount a summer show in the new space.
Meanwhile Clark Gallery in Lincoln has changed hands: Artists Dana Salvo and Dawn Southworth have purchased it from former owner Pamela Clark Cochrane. They took the reins last week.
And Space Other has announced that it will close its doors in the South End after three years at the end of April, but continue to stage exhibitions in nontraditional venues around the world through 2008. Plans include shows in Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, and San Juan.
Melting colors
While not exactly an ice sculptor, artist Judy Haberl makes ice her central medium. She freezes things in it, sometimes paints over or melts portions of the surface, and then photographs the ice. Her images at Gallery Kayafas have seductive charm, with textures, colors, and an alluring play of light. There's an eerie quality brought on by suspending things in ice. It's as if the frozen blocks are reliquaries, containers of what once was.
Sometimes Haberl goes for the jugular. "Implication #1" stirs a sickening sense of lost innocence. A baby doll hovers in a vase-shaped block of ice daubed with red and neon pink, over a bed strewn with pearls. The colors pop against a deep black background.
It hangs beside "Implication #8," one of several pieces that set us peering into the ice, like kids pressing our noses against a store window. We are swept up in this frozen world. Here, that contains grapes and swirling, thorny branches. Red seeps near the bottom like blood. The piece recalls Christ's crown of thorns, imprisoned in ice, yet charged with emotional heat.
Haberl also has on view several small sculptures of rubber, which she cast in clutch purses, also filled with odd items. She calls the series "Clutch Secrets," and she gives each work a woman's name: "Gladys" is amber; within the rubber float pearls, other jewels, and a hank of rope that could be used as noose. As in the photographs, these works look like the guts of an emotional matter trapped in time and exposed for examination.
Now you see it...
A glass door fissured with cracks stands at the center of "Death is just a rumor/ Spread by life," Ben Sloat's haunting installation at Laconia Gallery. A stuffed magpie hangs, wings spread and beak against the glass, as if at the moment of collision. The gallery is dark, but lights pour through the door, reflecting and refracting against the walls.
The setting has the feel of a David Lynch movie, with odd details and a sense of foreboding. A chess game sits on a table. A stairway leads up into a wall; a light flickers there, and if you climb it you'll see your shadow. A stuffed bat hovers in one dim corner.
The magic of the exhibition is in what you don't see, or what you barely see, as I noticed when I turned away from a light projector and glimpsed a prismatic rainbow in my peripheral vision. The glass door acts as a lens, casting images here and there, little slivers of beauty. Sloat clues us in with a series of gorgeous, nearly abstract color photos of the installation, "Show Me What My Eyes Cannot See," which freeze images the eye alone can't catch. The whole installation conjures the intangible and prompts marvel.
Print and power
The Cartin Collection, a private art collection based in Hartford, has moved into Mario Diacono's space at Ars Libri. There's a single dramatic piece in the window, a la Diacono, and a small group exhibition inside.
If you loved erector sets as a kid, you'll savor the one-man show. Wim Delvoye's "Flatbed Trailer Scale Model & Caterpillar 5C Scale Model" is a gorgeously intricate earth excavator on a tractor-trailer, crafted from laser-cut stainless steel in patterns taken from medieval religious architecture. Gothic cathedral meets industry and religion meets economics in a work of such detail and precision it might have been made of lace.
The heady group show, curated by Steven Holmes, grapples with text and language. There's Joseph Grigely's "Blueberry Surprise," a pigment print in which the artist runs bits of overheard conversation. Read it for visual or textual content; both are understated, discursive, and nonstop. Gregory Green's "Bible Bomb #008 (NY)" is more politically pointed. It's an old Bible opened to a passage in Genesis, but the pages have been cut out to store a pipe bomb, invoking the dangerous gravity with which some take God's word.
