Exploring the material world
'If you go on online, you can print out the entire human genome," explains Denise Driscoll as she stands in the main gallery of the New Art Center in Newton and flips through the pages of a thick printout.
"What I'm holding is just part of it. In 12-point font, it would take 6,500 pages" to print just the first chromosome, added the Holliston artist.
"It's amazing. It's what makes us human, and it's all there for someone like me to print out."
The concept is dizzying - the sorting of human life into a lengthy four-letter code. But it's a concept that Driscoll deftly hauls out of the abstract and into the tangible with her latest work, "DNA Blanket (labyrinth)," just one of six provocative pieces in a group show, "Material Meditation," at the New Art Center, in the city's Newtonville section. Its opening reception is 6 p.m. tomorrow.
Spread across the gallery floor, Driscoll's "blanket" looks like a simple but massive four-color quilt. But it depicts the exact pattern of a fraction of Chromosome 2. It's also fragile. Only a thin black thread holds together the tiny paper packets representing the nucleotides at the core of human existence. Visitors are invited to walk on it.
"This is about that human element becoming visible. It's all so infinitely huge, but it's common to every one of us," said Driscoll. "And if it shows wear and tear after people walk on it, that's part of it."
Driscoll wants visitors to leave impressions of their footprints. She wants us to become meditative or lost in her pattern's labyrinth-like design, to become part of the metaphor. She offers comfort - a blanket - as we contemplate our own existence, but forces us to damage it and feel lost.
"There's so much power in the knowledge the genome gives us," she said. "There's so much danger in what can be done with it, and also an amazing ability to use it to correct things and heal. There's so much we still have to figure out."
The blanket provides a space and moment to not only reflect on but to viscerally feel that debate.
Meticulous, heady but calm work such as this is Driscoll's evolving trademark as a relatively new installation artist. For years, Driscoll, 47, painted and exhibited while juggling a career in graphic design. But she felt a growing urge "to create opportunities for people to listen to themselves." So she left work, enrolled in Lesley University's Art Institute of Boston in 2005, earned her master's degree in fine arts, and delved into installation art.
Since then, she's created installations at smaller venues and worked on collaborative projects with students in public schools. But "Material Meditation," which she guest-curated as part of a competitive New Art Center program, feels like her coming-out party. And with her she brought along five equally noteworthy artists.
Each, like Driscoll, focuses on a specific material, say, bicycle inner-tubes, piano parts, or a window screen. Each also has an intricate, almost meditative artistic process. "And we all tend to work with some question or idea or desire to understand something that's puzzling us," said Driscoll.
For Lisa Kellner, that question is the role of facades, be they personal or political. In her "Untitled (The Emperor Has No Clothes)" (which itself has a facade in the title), balloon-like forms made of silk organza hang in the air in clumps. Together, they form a flimsy barrier, a facade, that is both alluring for its lightness and colors, but repulsive for its dripping, metastasizing cellular form - just like a lie that can dazzle at first but then grow awful and out of control. Behind them, the Senate building is outlined with the text of two political speeches.
"I'm not taking a particular political view," said Kellner, who has studios in New York and Virginia. "I'm just expressing a general frustration with the political climate . . . where it seems that if you just say something eloquently enough and with emotion, then it doesn't matter what you then do."
In an opposite corner, Linc Cornell's "Beach Knots" directs the focus to the overlooked and to the inner mind. The Natick resident combs the beaches of Cape Cod for washed up bits of rope and netting tied into knots. He then captures these frayed and twisted finds in crisp 5- foot-by-4-foot photographs that ultimately are glamour shots. The result is stunning. In rich hues, the knots take on human-like expressiveness and proportions.
"They become portraits, and they become Rorschach tests," said Cornell. "People claim them. They see things in them. They'll say, 'That's my relationship,' or 'That's just how I felt today.' Or 'That's my dad' or 'That's my mom.' . . . That's why I pick up the knots and leave the seashells."
Nearby, Wellesley artist Jodi Colella's "Undercurrent" is as delicate as a breath in form but as weighty as steel in content. A large rectangle of window screen, it is embroidered with steel wire to create abstract, water-like bubbling forms that cast a cauldron of shadows. It is both beautiful and full of contradictions and struggles: There is order to its patterns but chaos at its torn edges; it forms a barrier but is punctured; and its materials are human-made but its shapes are organic.
"It started out more about personal struggles," said Colella. "But the more I worked on it while listening to NPR, the more global it grew. There are power struggles and conflicts between countries stitched in there."
Rounding out the show are Michael Frassinelli of Holliston and Yuya Shiratori of Boston, who both take a personal approach to recycling. Frassinelli's piece is the latest in a series of folk-art-style works created entirely out of old piano parts by a fictional tribe he calls the Pianistas. But enter his "Pianista Observatory," an intricate arching Gothic gazebo, and you enter a charming lie born perhaps of a longing for tradition.
"It's supposed to look like outsider art, like something built by an obsessive-compulsive with delusions of grandeur," said Frassinelli.
"Because the story is that the Pianistas are not a real tribe, but actually a hoax," he said.
Shiratori, meanwhile, uses only old bicycle inner tubes. Sliced into rings, he glues them together to create graceful swaths of bold, rubbery lace. In "Re: Air" he has once again transformed trash into an elegant, curving form.
"My art is always about trying to find the next step to re-create, to find more possibilities," he said. "But it's also about connection with community, too. I had to create relationships in my neighborhood to get people to save inner tubes for me."
"Meditation is about focus, and this show is about focusing your vision," said Cornell. "It's to see what happens when you focus on an inner tube, or an idea like facades, or an envelope you put in the pattern of DNA. It's about what happens when you pay attention."
The opening reception for "Material Meditation" is 6-8 p.m. tomorrow at the New Art Center, 61 Washington Park, Newtonville; show runs through Oct. 26. Work alongside the artists 1-5 p.m. on the next two Sundays, and Oct. 19 and 26. Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 1-5 p.m. Free. 617-964-3424, newartcenter.org.
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