Over lunch at the Cambridge Innovation Center on Wednesday,   Mass Life Sciences Center (MLSC) President and CEO Susan Bannister told a gathering of some 100 life science afficionados that the first year of Gov. Deval Patrick’s Life Science Initiatiative has been a success. 

“There’s still capital out there and life science is a good place to put your money,” Bannister said.  “By putting state money into the pot, we have ‘de-risked’ investment that the state would have had to find elsewhere”.

 The funded projects–in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, diagnostics and bioinformatics–could create some 950 jobs in the near term, Bannister said.

By adding employment opportunities,  Massachusetts’  investments and incentives could help to absorb some of the job losses expected in other sectors, according to Bannister.

Frank Reynolds, CEO of InVivo Therapeutics, which is developing stem cell/ polymer technology aimed at halting the effects of traumatic spinal cord injury, said that receiving a $500 thousand loan just as  venture capital possibilities tanked this fall made a tremendous difference in his company’s ability to proceed. ”  It’s a great program,” Reynolds said. (Disclosure:   I work with InVivo).

Bannister cautioned  that in the current economic downturn, tax revenues are “iffy” and it’s not yet clear how much money will be available for the Initiative in 2010.

For more details, please visit  Harriscomblog.wordpress.com.

—Anita Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group of Cambridge, MA.

Ann Carlson and Cow

On a  recent visit to the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA,   I was amused at seeing a toddler sitting on a bench as he watched, with rapt attention, a huge wall-to-wall video of a naked middle-aged woman who was wearing a transparent raincoat partially filled with dollar bills, in a large, hay-filled stall. The woman seemed  to be trying to get the attention of a disinterested cow who did nothing for 8 minutes but chew its cud.  The toddler and the 10 or twelve adults sitting on a long bench opposite the video wall seemed fascinated. My friend Sheila and I were vaguely amused, but on the whole, thought the cow had it right.

Carlson/Strom: New Performance Video is composed of four room-sized video installations–the first major museum presentation of the collaborative work of choreographer and performer Ann Carlson and video instalation artist Mary Ellen Strom.

In what a DeCordova writeup describes as “elegant, sharply executed and humorous”, the artists present recent performance videos that serve as “critical re-evaluations of cultural and historical narratives”  fusing visually spectacular video and the medium’s legacy as a tool for social change. One video– footage of real lawyers mugging it up in front of an elevator,  is relatively funny.

Others, focused on “the moving body within a range of “lasndscapes:” the physical western vista, the economic terrain of late-capitalist America–Guatemalan workers on a beach, seemed sad, even tragic.

No doubt the  artists  are breaking artistic barriers, making important statements in order to get us think about society and our relationships to it. The videos are beautifully done–and maybe I’m being unfair, but I wonder whether, given the reality of life today,  Carlson and Strong might be telling us more about their own removed attitudes than than eliciting new understanding on our part.

The installation, curated by Dina Deitsch, is worth seeing, but Sheila and I  were more taken with”Face to Face, “ presented as a challenge “to our conventional understanding of portraiture by asking us to reevaluate the complexity of the genre and, by extension, representation itself.”

Face-to-Face/ Lebowitz-Young Dyptich

In a diptych, photgraphers  Dick Lebowitz and Tom Young show, in one photo,  three women on a beach; in the other, the photographer who is taking the picture. ” In another photo, “Karl Baden violates the singular ‘I’ by fragmenting his own body. Multiple mouths and eyese suggest that the human subject is a composite rather than a finite whole.”

I agree with curatorial fellow Nina Bozicnik that the images bring up questions of identity, portraiture and representation. But, meaningful as they may be,  most of the photos are actually fun/interesting/pleasing  to look at.

We had a harder time with Tabitha Ververs’ “Narrative Bodies, “ which includes sixty (!)  paintings and sculptures highlighting  ” the artist’s feminist engagement with tradition and myth.

“Knives carved out of bone become the surface on which female perpetrators of violence throughout history are incised using the scrimshaw techniques.”

Work from a  more recent series of meticulous acryllic paintings on canvas challenges  gender roles by depicting women with tails,  “human” creatures with four legs and male and female anatomy, a mermaid with a split tail and the like.

Another series, exploring the relationship of humans to the sea, is painted on shells in an ancient and intricate Japanese tradition.

Vevers’ pale blues, pinks, peaches, and gold prolific are  lovely but the exhibit, curated by Nick Capasso,  is,  ultimately, disturbing–and no doubt, meant to be.

Sheila and I were most  impressed by a retrospective of the work of the late  Boston University  art professor Harold “Red” Tovish, (1921-2008), curated by Bozicnik.

Tovish self portrait-drawing

We especially liked a display of six bronze sculptures showing the artist’s face and head in a range styles including cubism, surrealism and  what the DeCordova describes as “contemporary biomorphic abstraction.”

Our only disappointment was that by late Sunday afternoon,  the cafe had closed so we were too late to sip  peach iced tea on the deCordova’s lovely terrace.

But  the  provocative art, gardens, outdoor sculptures and view on this early spring day were well worth the trip.

The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park is located at 51 Sandy Pond Rd
Lincoln, MA 01773 781/259-8355. All four exhibits will be up through May 17.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, www.harriscom.com.

Hatry photo, Menard Gallery Heads and Tales

If Heide Hatry’s provocative photographic show—Heads and Tales–at the Peirre Menard Gallery, (10 Arrow St. in Cambridge) is meant to shock: it does. In fact, for a few moments,  it made me fear for the mental health of the artist, who has (beautifully–even lovingly)  photographed her sculptures portraying female victims of violent death.

Hatry, who grew up in Germany and moved to New York City in 2003,  sculpted life-sized female mannequins from clay and covered them with untreated pigskin (a cold wet sample of which is available in the gallery with the notice: “please touch”). She added raw meat for the lips and fresh pig eyes—and in some cases, flies, safety pins, and other props—creating, according to the gallery writeup, “the illusion of life where there is none”.

Hatry then photographed the mannequins—some enlarged to 20”x 30”, others more life-size, at 12” x 18”.

Viewed from afar, the photographs appear lifelike, but close up, you realize the subjects are constructs—adding physical and intellectual layers to the artist’s statements on the horrifying situations faced by many women—and on photography’s role in bringing the inanimate to life.

Hatry’s “views” are further emphasized by accompanying tales about the “women’s” lives (and deaths) as imagined by 27 writers—some of them well known feminists.

The show is well-conceived and displayed, which makes its subject matter all the more disturbing.

The exhibit, which opened Feb 13, 2009, will run through March 15. It corresponds with the release of Hatry’s book, Heads and Tales, and with readings, book signings and the premiere of a play.

AMH

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group of Cambridge, MA.

With the ever increasing fall of bookstores and impending newspaper layoffs, I’d like to echo Alex Beam’s call for readers to reach for their wallets.

In case you missed his January 9 column, “Closing Costs,” in the Boston Globe, it opens: “Here is a dispatch from the Land of No Suprises: Bookstores–buffed by the recession, by Amazon, by electronic reading devices–are closing their doors”. He points out that, easy as it is to go to Amazon for books and read newspapers online for free, by behaving normally, “you kill the things you love.”

In Boston, after several waves of reporter buyouts, people keep telling me that they’ve dropped their subscriptions to the Globe because it’s gone downhill, and, anyway, they can get it on line, for free. Duh.

My apologies for stating the obvious, but many of my friends don’t seem to get that, in  a vicious financial cycle,  with fewer paying customers,   the paper can get fewer advertisers, revenues go down, and, as a result, the Globe and many other papers have had to  “encourage”  their most senior,  talented reporters to leave.  The Globe announced  a new round of editorial layoffs just last week.

I’ll be writing more about this–but for the time being, please support the  free press–by paying for it.

The New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, of Cambridge, MA.