Play of light makes for a standout exhibit
Alpha Gallery is a painter's gallery. Every June, when Alpha mounts its "New Talent" show, the local school it seems to draw on most is Boston University, which has a painting-rich master of fine arts program. The work is often good, but rarely surprising.
This year, three of the four artists in the show come from BU. Then there's Clint Baclawski, a photographer from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, whose work stands out like a neon sign. Baclawski mounts large-scale photographic transparencies in two-sided light boxes, which he places on the floor.
Both content and form weirdly captivate. The artist photographs milling crowds from a distance. Then he uses Photoshop to add and subtract. Often, he creates scenes that capture the charged moment when individuals coalesce into a group, or the group disperses into individuals. In "Consolation," shot at a dog show, he pits the individual against the group, isolating one woman and her Samoyed in a pale light in the middle of the frame as other people and dogs cluster at the edges.
The images on either side of a box mirror each other, but you can't tell which is the original because the artist has gone into the photo digitally and righted reversed text - say, on a sign.
Baclawski has the light boxes on slow dimmers. If you breeze by, you won't notice; stay with a photo long enough, you'll notice the light receding or growing. The wickedly slow pace may make you think your eyes are failing before you realize it's not you, it's the art, which never goes completely dark. The mysterious light change reinforces the mystery and unease in each photograph, and the question of whether things are coming together or falling apart. It's thoughtful, edgy work, reflective not just of new talent, but new ideas.
Of the three painters on view, my favorite is Jonathan Daly. He depicts winter evenings in a lurid, chilly green-blue glow that imbues each scene with otherworldliness and loneliness, as in "Woodchuck," in which a bearded man stands in the snow pointing a rifle.
Abraham Storer does an able job straddling the line between representation and abstraction in his landscapes, such as "Virgin Forest," in which he breaks down trees, land, sky, and shadow into component parts, each with its own flat color. Adrienne Rae Ginter does something similar in her small, wooded landscapes, which look like tiny versions of Neil Welliver paintings. Her larger works take a girlish focus on baubles; in "Leaving," they spill over and out of an open bureau, which looms over a couple on the floor. The woman is distracted on a cellphone; the man gazes at a snapshot of her in which she looks exactly as she does beside him. While well executed, "Leaving" comes out of a stream of painting from BU that has focused in recent years on 20-something feminine angst. It's a better subject for pop music than it is for painting.
Soft and bright
Kiran, also known as Karen Meninno, would do well to choose one name or the other. Still, she has an intriguing if not quite fully realized show up at Kingston Gallery, curated by William Kerr, owner of Gallery XIV. The India-born artist makes soft sculptures out of the materials used to make saris. They manage to be both elegant and goofy, as their pretty surfaces sweeten their hulking, lumpen forms.
Bright, silken, occasionally sparkly, and traced over with thread, they verge toward human form then veer away. Singly, they'd come across as half-baked, but as a group, and surrounded by eye-catching mandala-like wall drawings and wall sculptures, they create a festive atmosphere.
Also at Kingston are Catelin Mathers-Suter's sparse drawings of parking lots. She intricately and unnervingly examines spaces most ignore. In "Lotscape Chainlink" she evokes the crisscross of the fence in white space, filling in the diamonds between; trees in the distance are also white, so the image, a feat of detailed rendering, reads almost like a negative.
The art of language
Cecilia Méndez pulls together several bodies of work in "palabración," a show celebrating the spicy stew of language and culture she grew up with in her Panamanian-American home. The works draw on her love of tools, language, and family. The sculptures - such as the altarlike "Homage to Abuelita" (made for the artist's grandmother) - read like ritual objects, with a magical realist slant.
She offers up several intricately crafted prints and drawings and three simply animated films, which frolic in the realms of language and tools. In the film "despepitándose por/ yearning for," she plays on the similarities between the Spanish words for "to yearn" (as in the title) and "to core" (despepitar). Apple corers chase an apple as Méndez recites sumptuous, lyrical text flitting between Spanish and English and combining the two.
There's nothing new about Méndez's forms, but sometimes that's not the point. These works feel rooted, fluid, and playful.
