Picturing the future at the Toale gallery
Photo exhibits are final shows before transition
The last two official shows at the Bernard Toale Gallery offer, appropriately, a piquant balance of familiar and fresh. Over the summer, Toale intends to hand his roster of artists over to gallery director Joseph Carroll, who will reopen the space in September as Carroll Inc. Toale isn't retiring; he plans to divvy up the space with Carroll, and he'll have a consulting business and a small gallery on the premises.
So his two current exhibits, photographs by old favorite Abelardo Morell and by Naoki Honjo, a Japanese artist who has never shown in the United States before, may mark the end of an era, since Toale has run one of Boston's premier galleries since 1992. But they still offer a whiff of things to come, from both Toale and Carroll. They don't say goodbye; they say "see you in September."
Morell's exhibit, a catch-all, serves up several bodies of work, including his sumptuous, theatrical, large-scale camera obscura prints. To make a camera obscura, the artist essentially turns a darkened room into a camera. A small hole in a window shade becomes the lens, projecting an inverted image of whatever is outside onto an opposite wall. Morell set up a camera obscura in a Venetian palazzo, then aimed his own large-format camera at the projected images of the church Santa Maria della Salute, and made exposures that lasted five to 10 hours.
Two of these prints hang side by side. In one, Morell used a prism to turn the upside-down church right-side-up. The prism blurs it into a mirage beside the fantastically detailed inverted image, like a reflection in water. Together, they riddle the eye and expectations.
He employs another old-fashioned technique in seven lushly textured abstractions of the continents. Cliché-verre involves making images by smoking glass, smudging or scratching it, then using it as a negative. It's the photographer's version of a monoprint.
Morell also shoots paintings at unusual angles, chopping them up or pairing them with other works of art. I like his black-and-white images of last summer's Edward Hopper show at the Museum of Fine Arts. He photographed "Morning Sun by Hopper" obliquely, so the mournful shot of a woman gazing out a window narrows. Squeezed, it loses none of its grief, but aches all the more.
At first, Naoki Honjo looks to be another photographer making small worlds big by shooting models, like James Casebere or Lori Nix. Look again: Honjo shoots real life from a distance in such a way that it looks like a bright, stiff little diorama. He does it with careful focus - the edges all blur, while the centers seem indelibly sharp. In "Tokyo, Japan (Taxi Stand)," the cabs read like matchbox cars, and the people frozen in the crosswalk could be the inch-tall figurines model-makers use. There's a pathos to seeing the fine-tuned perfection we expect of models in depictions of actual people and places.
An exhibit with zip
Handyman, prankster, and artist Tom Sachs has a small exhibit at the Cartin Collection @ Ars Libri. It can't measure up to the ambitious one-man show he had last year at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, but it teases with sly humor and unnerves with undertones of violence. Some of the work inflates elitism; for instance he's crafted "Chanel Rat" and "Hermes Rat" out of paper from those brands.
The lurid and funny "Shot Marilyn
There's also a small, graceful exhibit of Cary Smith's abstract paintings and works on paper at the Cartin Collection; they range from extraordinarily fine-tuned grid drawings in graphite to loopy, graphic paintings composed with perfect balance.
Cerebral works
"MINDmatters," a group show at Laconia Gallery organized by Geoffrey Koetsch and Ellen Schön, aims to examine how society's perception of the brain has shifted from psychology to neuroscience.
Since neuroscience is concerned with mapping the brain, there are a lot of brain-inspired images. But these evocations of the brain at work don't effectively capture the imaginative zeitgeist around our understanding of it.
At the DeCordova Annual, Eva Lee's multichannel video of landscapes based on EEGs may be clumsy, but it still does a better job of exploring neuroscience's understanding of the mind than anything here does.
Many pieces are well made - Constance Jacobson's monoprints and drawings are gorgeously textured. Heidi Whitman's abstract paintings are a pleasure. Audrey Goldstein's witty "Backpack" conflates social connections with neural ones. The few pieces such as this, which move beyond the picture of the brain into metaphors for how it works, are the most effective.
