With disparate views, they vividly evoke city life
NEWTON -- ''Icograms" is a mystifying title for a show purportedly about the theme ''the metropolis as a metaphor for modern civilization."
The description isn't a good fit for the current exhibition at the New Art Center in Newton. Once you get past the verbiage, though, most of the art speaks quite clearly for itself.
The show was organized by two New York artists, Clay Hensley and Anthony Smith Jr., who include their own work in it, along with art by two other New Yorkers, Carlos Ancalmo and Rie Oishi.
Hensley and Smith both make mixed-media pieces; those at NAC are two-dimensional and have some connection with urban life. Other than that, they could hardly be more different. Hensley's work is hushed; Smith's screams.
Hensley is the star of the show. Virtually all his work has sold, not only because it's unabashedly beautiful, but also because, like almost everything in the exhibition, it's a bargain: His paintings start at $250.
He's a wanderer, as titles including ''Foundry Covers (Nairobi)" and ''Highway 59 at Holly Grove, Gilt Edge, Tennessee" indicate. Using photography and rubbings to document his sites, he then transfers the images to canvas and incorporates debris that gives the final product a gritty texture.
His largest work at NAC, ''Foundry Covers," is a grid of nine 2-foot-square canvases. Each holds a circle, and some of the circles have words -- ''Puerto Rico Telephone" or ''Water" -- suggesting that they're based on Hensley's rubbings of manhole covers in streets in various locales. The palette is warm and muted, from off-white to taupe, which gives a ghostly quality to the piece. Both the restricted colors and the repeating circles within circles unify this work, which comes across as a lyrical version of the ''target" paintings of Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns.
Smith's brash works are on image overload, starting with the first piece you see entering the gallery, his ''Struts and Flags." Like all of his work in the show, this quartet of little pieces is tacked directly onto the wall, which gives them the immediacy of posters slapped onto city buildings. The work suggests an energetic, even raucous urban celebration, maybe a parade, with knobby little black proto people reminiscent of painter Layla Ali's cast of green-skinned characters. Like Ali's figures, Smith's are cartoonish. The ones in ''Struts and Flags" hold long ribbons that end in silver orbs: Helium balloons, perhaps?
Smith works in series. Several of his ''Warrior Cycle" pieces are in the Newton show. They're crammed, the elements jostling for space like the people and buildings of an overcrowded city. The ''Warrior" works are large -- 6 feet across -- which adds to their punch. They pull you in from far away. Size is also a dominant factor in the series called ''Head Shots 1-8," only here it's the small scale that makes the works effective. You have to be just inches away to make out the pictures of men collaged onto the surface. Study them closely, and you discover that some are pornographic. Smith makes a joke out of making you look hard to find them.
Ancalmo is the show's sculptor, working with fragile materials including paper and string, like a child using whatever is at hand to create a private universe. According to the show's literature, his work is about ''transnational identity," a category that encompasses a vast amount of contemporary art and can easily slip into the ''roots" cliche. The work of Ancalmo, born in El Salvador, doesn't.
Ancalmo enjoys odd juxtapositions, placing a red plastic crate in the embrace of a baby-pink rectangular structure, or joining a pair of guitars at the strings, turning them into Siamese twins. His largest piece in this show is ominously titled ''And a holy War (Andy Warhola?)," but it seems more playful than belligerent. It starts with a boxy little building of uncertain purpose, perched on the gallery's stage. What appears to be a highway, studded with little palm trees on the median strip, stretches 25 feet into the gallery and then ends abruptly, with the only hint at violence in the piece: tiny sticks that jut out aggressively, like missiles about to be launched. But in the end they're overwhelmed by the sheer sweetness of the other elements, including those toy trees, the road made of ordinary cardboard that looks salvaged from someone's trash, and the structure underneath the road, painted powder blue and not looking strong enough to hold up a highway.
Oishi's DVD ''Sea of Fertility," projected onto a wall in its own curtained-off room, seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the ''metropolis" theme and no connection at all with the built environment. Its motion does indeed suggest a sea. The abstract bits of flotsam and jetsam float, bob, jump up and down like waves, and in general cavort happily until they fade away. Occasionally a human face appears, only to dissolve quickly. The pace and pulse of the piece change constantly over its 3½-minute life. Watching it is addictive. It's easy to imagine it as a replacement for the painting over the sofa, in a residential setting. That's feasible because, like Hensley, who was willing to sell the nine pieces of his ''Foundry Covers" individually or as a set, Oishi has fun with prices. Her other piece in the show, a DVD called ''Banana Tree," costs $123, so it's logical -- in a weird way -- that the larger ''Sea of Fertility" go for $234.
''Icograms" is part of the New Art Center's 14-year-old Curatorial Opportunity Program, which solicits ideas for shows from outside rather than paying for an in-house curator, which it can't afford. Successful applicants get a $1,000 stipend, play money in terms of producing a show.
Often, the proposals come from artists who include their own work in the mix, which is one way to get it seen. The wisdom of this dual role is debatable: The worst-case scenario would be not-so-hot artists organizing shows of more talented ones, riding on their coattails. In ''Icograms," fortunately, the work of the two artist/curators deserves its place on the walls.
On April 30, the four artists will give a 2 p.m. gallery talk. I've got my questions lined up: They have to do with titles, starting with the show's, and how on earth these artists determine their prices.
