Compelling the eyes of the beholder
You don't know how much the eye willfully ignores until an artist calls attention to it.
Joan Linder does just that with her life-size pen-and-ink drawings, mostly of baby paraphernalia, at Judi Rotenberg Gallery. Linder, a new mom and inveterate and relentless draftswoman, turns her attention to stuff intended to enrapture infants with brightly colored knobs and baubles. But she doesn't render it in color. Working strictly in black ink with a quill pen, she engages with the bouncy seats and toys in a way that commands scrutiny.
It's partly that, drained of color, the objects' often bizarre forms stand out, but it also has to do with Linder's hand, which while precise, leaves room for odd wobbles and blots that bring her subjects frighteningly to life.
Sometimes, as in "Excersaucer," which looks like a many-legged toadstool studded with nubs and nodules, they come across as benignly monstrous. "Spring Loaded," a depiction of a bouncy seat complete with the mighty vice that affixes it to a doorframe, looks like a strange mix of diaper and torture device. A series of images of baby seats resemble angry ducks with bloated beaks; the open seats with the protective hood are as threatening as they are inviting.
Every new mother knows that the washer and dryer, and indeed her own body, are as much baby accessories as any rattle. Linder captures these, too, in a comically woozy "Front Loader," which has the laundry machines apparently gazing out, their clear doors like the rolling eyes of an exhausted mom.
Her "Mammaries" series, depicting a variety of swollen animal teats, including a grid of human nipples, daunts with detail. Linder's work has often had a feminist twist, evoked with nuance thanks to the sheer depth of her observation. The "Mammaries" series may poke fun at a baby's, and indeed society's, commodification of mama's breasts, but they're also fascinating and disturbing to see. As is all of the work in this show.
Power source
Photographer Bremner Benedict, too, pulls attention to something many people consciously ignore: electrical towers. We avert our eyes from them, perhaps because we find them ugly, or because they often appear in the middle of otherwise natural landscapes.
Benedict puts us face to face with them; each of her color photographs frames only a portion of a greater network of wires and towers, planting us amidst them, so close in it's hard to determine their scale. She also appears to play, now and then, with double exposure, although it's hard to say for sure (and she hasn't).
Look at "Saint Catherines, Canada," in which a blur of chain link fence seems to merge with startlingly clear towers and wires, gleaming against the sun under a brilliant sky. Is the fence in front of the structures, or behind? Its scale suggests the former, but Benedict foils any such assumptions, as the towers seem to rise to the image's surface.
"Alewife, Cambridge, MA" is more direct, an unflinching examination of what looks like a crown of giant coils, each attached to three long, looping cables that reach out to more metal coils. The thing has a toy-like allure, but this is likely much bigger than anything you'd make with your Erector Set; to the eyes of someone who knows nothing of electrical engineering, like me, the image reeks of power and menace.
These photographs have seemingly little connection to images Benedict had in the 2002 DeCordova Annual. Those were shot with a toy camera in black-and-white, and featured mysterious figures wielding mirrors. They do share a fascination with currents of power. The earlier, dreamlike images mined the unconscious, and the power of the unknown; these take a more direct approach, looking at the beauty and ugliness of the machines that generate and conduct power. These, I think, are sparer, and they're better.
Sublime moments
Another draftswoman, Katy Fischer, has a show at Proof that, despite sublime moments, often stumbles. The best of her gouache drawings and collages are the simplest, focusing on the strength of her technique rather than on bloated content. In "moon" she traces mountain ranges, or perhaps high tides, reaching toward a golden Luna from four directions in white-on-gray. They rise like licks of flame, fluttering with pale lines. Even ink splatters, adding a thread of chaos in the middle, shine with dots of white gouache.
"Water" has a racing river, blue traced across with silvery white, over a long stretch of paper. Hundreds of lines ripple, collide, and fold into one another; the work must have been an exercise in tremendous patience, and that pays off. It's a startlingly sensual drawing.
"River" follows the same route, with a few odd bits thrown in, and that's still OK: Bobbing along, we see ancient pottery, an owl, a woman, and more. The bits seem disconnected, and that works; in other drawings, trees and clouds strain toward metaphor. "Eagle," in particular, a giant, bluish bald eagle, is more emblem than it is art.
