Comedy and melancholy down on the farm
Videos, paintings look under surface
Mary Ellen Strom & Ann
Carlson: New Video Work
At: Judi Rotenberg Gallery,
130 Newbury St., through April 26.
617-437-1518, judirotenberg.com
Melissa Hutton: Rough Landing
At: Kidder Smith Gallery, 131 Newbury
St., through April 26. 617-424-6900,
kiddersmithgallery.com
Tory Fair and Nuno De Campos
At: LaMontagne Gallery, 555 East 2d
St., South Boston, through May 3.
617-482-8400, lamontagnegallery.com
In 1974, the German artist Joseph Beuys spent three days in a room with a coyote. "I Like America and America Likes Me" was a performance piece in which Beuys, who had a shamanistic streak, using animals as metaphors having to do with healing, played the Native-American reverence for the coyote against our more recent view of the animal as a pest.
Video artist Mary Ellen Strom and choreographer Ann Carlson have spun their own feminist version of Beuys's performance in "Madame 710," a sweet, sharp, raucously funny video at Judi Rotenberg Gallery. Just last September, Rotenberg showed the duo's equally comic video of lawyers dancing. Next January, the two will have a show at the DeCordova Museum.
The three-channel projection "Madame 710" sets Carlson in a gallery with a cow, who has an udder swollen with milk and a yellow ear tag reading "710." Beuys wore felt; Carlson wears nothing but a hooded clear plastic jacket half-stuffed with dollar bills. She dances around the cow to the strains of a Mozart motet, "Exsultate, jubilate."
Carlson comes off as at once sincere and ridiculous. She never looks at the camera. But the cow does, and so the viewer enters the world of the video through the animal, which seems far more rational and grounded than the prancing, bowing dancer.
As in Beuys's piece, "Madame 710" indulges in metaphors aplenty. The cow, needing to be milked, is a symbol of industrial dairy farming; the money in Carlson's jacket represents the economic relationship between people and farm animals. The artists make a correlation between woman and cow - Carlson's breasts are as present here as the cow's udder. Both can be seen as commodities (the "Madame" of the title is a double entendre), and also as objects of reverence. The phrase "cash cow" comes to mind.
"Madame 710" has fey humor. It's also lovely to look at. Strom plays with symmetry, odd cropping, shadows, and images running in reverse, such as one in which hay seems to rise swiftly into the air. All these things make Carlson and Strom's denser messages about consumerism and sexism quite palatable.
Ominous nature
Melissa Hutton's dark, atmospheric landscapes at Kidder Smith Gallery are artfully crafted, with that gallery's trademark high-gloss punch. They work best when she doesn't try to infuse political statements into the art. The more open-ended of these mixed-media paintings leave room for the viewer's imagination to romp.
Hutton layers epoxy resin on a wood panel, then applies a color transparency of a photo she has taken herself or gotten off the Internet. More epoxy, perhaps another transparency, and spray paint. Most paintings are four or five layers, finished off with clear epoxy. With some, she affixes dowels to the bottom and lets the materials drip down them, forming dark icicles; these push her already theatrical scenes toward the melodramatic.
Those icicles drive home a point too harshly in "Drain #3," a crisp image of vast, empty landscape under a brooding sky with a gas station perched on the horizon line, its logo a bright red droplet. The field in the foreground runs with red furrows, which seem to drip right off the panel. Here, the message feels pat: blood, oil, and farmland all tie together in a visual fable of doom.
"Just Below the Surface" and "Could've Used A Push" also feature roiling skies and deep landscapes, dwarfing the tiny traces of civilization, which sit on the horizon like birds on a wire. In the first, it's a house, and the horizon line burns neon orange. In the second, it's a tree with an empty swing. Hutton creates a high-pitched, ominous world in which nature will always win.
Sculpted meaning
Sculptor Tory Fair offers a mixed bag at LaMontagne Gallery. Coming off her installation last year at the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery, which was bright and charmingly goofy with oversized flowers, Fair scales back, making conspicuously dour work. A series of rubber pieces, each titled "Lily Block Bloom," features long-stemmed lilies wilting to the floor from ugly blocks; the works don't just feel unfinished, they feel dead. It's as if the CAC show was too peppy, and now she has swung too far in the other direction.
More successful are two pieces titled "Border Field," for which Fair has molded ornate, filigreed empty frames from rubber and mounted them on the wall. The contrast of the usually polished baroque form with the tacky black rubber is funny and satisfying. And "Pick me, Pull me," a botanical version of Dr. Doolittle's "pushmi-pullyu," lies coiled on a pedestal, beautiful and oddly threatening.
The degree of nuanced detail in Nuno De Campos's paintings and drawings of winter in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, also at LaMontagne Gallery, almost makes you feel the hush and chill of the park right after snowfall. "Walking her Dog (monument)" captures the unsullied snow in pale blues and purples, with a gray monument like a shrouded beacon in the distance, framed by the crisp scratch of bare branches against the sky.
