Every first Friday of the month, the SOWA Boston Galleries at 450 Harrison Ave stay open late, a great chance to check out the openings of all the new shows!
Find & Form Space presented a fantastic showing of innovative and interactive new art this month, called “Let’s Get Banausick!”, curated by Gregor Spamsa. Each artist brings their own very unique perspective to the themes of work, labor, money, and time.
Ricardo de Lina
Ricado de Lima comments on the woes of being an underpaid artist by laser-cutting into a stack on one hundred single dollar bills.
Helen Miller
Helen Miller displays archival footage of Moshé Feldenkrais, the inventor of the Feldenkrais Method, at work with a patient. Miller explores the role of this alternative treatment method in relation to aesthetics and art. She invites viewers to fill out a medical-style form, answering questions about their own experience with topics such as limitations, physical mobility, aesthetics, and Feldenkrais.
LEFT: Sally Scopa, RIGHT: Iris Cutler
Sally Scopa exhibits a large banner, created as a diagrammatic record of a large gold-plated panel the artist pulled from storage at the Carpenter Center to use as a work table. The “print” maintains the character of the surface on which it was created. Iris Cutler created “Not Another Fountain,” which offers a manifesto on the economy of compassion and the value of a copper penny. The manifesto invites viewers to write a wish on the fountain sitting on the gallery floor and to take a penny as payment.
The featured image at the top of the article is a frame from Elizabeth Watkins‘ “Studies in Motion and Time.” Watkins examines the motions of workplace labor through remixing corporate films in such a way to render once productive labor as absurd.
The whole show left me engaged and wanting more time to fully explore the individual artworks before I had to force myself to move on to the next gallery!
Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb
Ars Libri pulls from the archives of itinerant photographers, Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb, to create the exhibition “Slant Rhymes.” The show consists of a series of paired photographs drawn from the Webb’s many bodies of work created around the world. Alex Webb’s talent for capturing his human subjects in near cinematic situations is paired with Rebecca Norris Webb’s masterful way of capturing her animal subjects bathed in gorgeous light.
Carroll and Sons is now displaying work by Greg Mencoff called “Chasing Artifacts.”
Greg Mencoff
Mencoff’s sculptures offer a commanding presence in the room, particularly the piece, “What We Carry.” This piece consists of dozens of wooden structures clustered around a central pillar in the gallery. Mencoff’s work plays with form, illusion, and shadow. The wooden forms on the floor are roughly rectangular, but their tilting angles give them an organic feeling. The insides of the blocks are made pitch black with graphite, so the interiors seem to flatten out into two-dimensional spaces contained within three-dimensional forms, creating a rather disorienting effect. It’s only when the visitor approaches the sculpture more closely that that the wooden floor is visible through the hollow blocks and the two-dimensional effect falls away.
Bromfield Gallery is currently showing work by artists Gayle Caruso and Tim McDonald.
Gayle Caruso
Gayle Caruso’s pieces are both commanding and delicate. Inspired by a near death experience, Caruso’s mixed-media photographs and paintings are her way of drawing closer to depicting transcendant bright white light.
Tim McDonald
McDonald uses symmetry and repetition to manipulate photos of his hikes through New England. The resulting kaleidoscope images are reminiscent of religious icon paintings.
Kingston Gallery is housing three shows by artists Susan Alport, Eugene La Rochelle, and Elif Soyer.
Susan Alport
Susan Alport transports part of her studio workspace into the front gallery. Alport plays with capturing a feeling of process and flux by freezing and exporting a moment from her creative process into the gallery space.
Eugene La Rochelle
Eugene La Rochelle takes on the duel-themes of being biracial and queer in a series of prints. The print series begins with the sentence, “There are no gay people in Korea,” stated simply in black ink. Each print adds duplicates of this phrase, overlaying the original sentence, becoming increasingly chaotic, until their message is lost within a dark, black, rectangular smudge.
Elif Soyer
Elif Soyer’s work delicately depicts shapes that are both specific and abstract, evoking an elegant dance of organelles.
Maya Chaimovich
Maya Chaimovich displays beautiful squares of color that at first seem to be abstract paintings, but then delightfully reveal themselves of be quilts. The swaths and trails of color are formed from small pieces of fabric, sewn together in a grand collage.
That’s all for this month, see you in November! Until then, you can find me writing at Suzi Looks at Art.
*Photos taken by Suzi Grossman
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