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Darcy Badiali at Concord’s Lacoste Gallery

Darcy Badali, Lacoste opening, gallery window

Darcy Badali, Lacoste Opening

Earlier this month,  I much enjoyed the opening of  Lacoste Gallery’s current exhibit, “The Transcendent Vessel,” which features astonishingly-large thrown stoneware vessels by California ceramicist Darcy Badiali.

I especially liked the delicacy of his works, which, in some cases, resemble giant eggshells. Other pieces, he explains, “are reminiscent of plants, stones coral and other objects found in nature, ” with surfaces that look or feel like elephant skin or craters.  While the forms have their origin in function, ” he adds, “the scale lends itself to sculptural issues of space.

Darcy and Tracy Badiali, and assistant

Badiali’s works are included in the permanent collections of Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for the Arts, Alta Loma, CA, American Museum of Ceramic Art, Los Angeles, CA, Kathryn H. Herberger Museum, Tempe, AZ, Daum Museum of Art, Sedalia, MO, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO, Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT, and in Shigaraki, Japan in the Shiro Otani Collection. 

At the Lacoste Gallery in Concord MA through May 27. 

—Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is a writer and photographer based in Cambridge, MA.

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




Artists El Anatsui and Chihuli Bring Glass, Wood, Color, Imagination to Life

After a week of torrential rains,  my friend E and I  felt a huge need for light and color–so took in  two excellent retrospective art exhibits: Dale Chihuli’s  Through the Looking Glass at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and   El Anatsui‘s When I Last Wrote to You about Africa at  Wellesley College’s Davis Museum, in Wellesley, MA.

Through the Looking Glass is a 40-year retrospective of the Washington State artist’s blown glass sculptures–such as a boat containing thousands of  glass flowers, fantastical forests,  sculptures based on South American basketry–which took  us out of our doldrums and got our imaginations flowing and reminded us that we can each create worlds of our own.

El Anatsui, Plot A Plan III, 2007. Aluminum and copper wire, 73 x 97 in. Photo courtesy: Jack Shainman Gallery. In When I Last Wrote to You about Africa ,  the  West African artist El Anatsui  transformed mundane materials into forms and objects that were beautiful and real.

Surveying nearly five decades of the West African artist’s internationally renowned career, the exhibit featured some sixty works in wood, metal ceramic, painting, print and drawing.  E and I especially loved the gorgeous tapestry created from used wine-bottle caps and labels; wooden sculpture made from open boxes meant to remind viewers of the opening of market stalls and paintings of African colors, shapes. More difficult and disturbing was  a stone-carved head–with traditional face but open in back to reveal not much in the brain.

An additional highlight was an exhibit of fashions designed by Wellesley students–meant to interpret the  show.  I particularly liked one showing a long, flowing fancy dress which, on closer glance, turned made of a black garbage bag, with collar and ruffle resembling feathers–but made from cut up magazines–all commenting on the ephemeral nature, I believe, of show business careers.    E was partial to a dress with a bodice composed of typewriter keys…reflecting El Anatsu’si use of everyday objects in creating new ones.

Apologies for waiting so long to see/write about this one–(it closed on June 26) but E says the ICA has acquired one of the works; that will definitely be worth seeing, there.

Chihuly/ Through the Looking Glass will be at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through August 7, 2011.

Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is a journalist, photographer and President of the Harris Communications Group of Cambridge, MA.




Art of Decay: Where Do We Go From Here?

This month, Charles LeDray and Evelyn Rydz at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston,  and Leonardo Drew, at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, share a common theme–all focus on decay and the passage of time.

DeDray makes small items–men’s clothing, thousands of tiny ceramic pots,  sculptures in stitched fabric, carved bone, and wheel-thrown clay. As ICA materials point out, the smaller-than-life formal suits, embroidered patches, ties, and hats, as well as scaled-down chests of drawers, doors, and unique, thimble-sized vessels–and even facsimiles of used clothing stores complete with dust, make the viewer feel large and encourage thought about the content of the constructions. For example the coat in the photo to the left encompasses all sorts of other clothing–bras, pants, tops–making the point that individuals are composites of their experiences and other people.

My friend E liked the exhibit–because it elicited people no longer with us.  S, who tends to save things, found it interesting.

Nearby, in the galleries housing winners in the ICA’s Annual Foster Prize Exhibit, Evelyn Rydz’s “intricate drawings of beaches, based on her own photographs–focus on objects she finds washed up on coastlines worldwide. ”

According to the ICA, this work explores ” the site where sea meets land”…and shows “characters with long stories to tell.” She “references the journey and transformation that these objects have undergone, illuminating their role as castaways in foreign landscapes.”

TitleAt the DeCordova, Drew’s show, “Existed”  highlights  “the cyclical nature of creation, decay, and regeneration through a selection of large-scale sculptures, installations, and works on paper.

Built from rows of stacked cotton and wooden boxes, stuffed with rags, covered with scavenged objects, and caked with rust to suggest degeneration, Drew’s sculptural work is made to resemble the detritus of everyday life.

The artist often ages his found and fabricated materials, employing a process that is physically and conceptually steeped in memory, history, and the passage of time. These disparate materials are often composed within a grid that organizes the chaos into an ordered structure.

 Not exactly the pleasantest of subjects.

And  I suppose it’s good to be able to find beauty in decay–or to make beauty of  it.

In pondering the  decisions to highlight these artists,  I can’t help but conclude that  the curators are  making  statements about the current state of civilization, politics, and art.  All of these artists are highly skilled at what they do. But  I ask, after exploring and commenting on decay and loss, what is left for them (and us?) to do?

Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris, a writer and photographer, is president of the Harris Communications Group of Cambridge, MA.




In and Out: Chakaia Booker–untiring at the DeCordova

Chakaia Booker 5-21-10

  Another must see:  Chakaia Booker’s  big black sculptures made from rubber tires, at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA.

Booker "Picture frame"

Outdoor sculptures include a  huge “picture frame” made of tire scraps assembled on some sort of armature– through which you can see a corner of the museum . Also,  inverted tee-pee-like structure, composed of V-shaped scraps, on a scaffolding.

"No More Milk and Cookies"

 Indoors: complex forms,  freestanding and on the walls–which embody shapes, textures, and visually complex abstract scenes “referencing African textiles and body decoration to evoke issues of black culture, identity, gender, and environmentalism,” as the DeCordova Web site explains.

The sculptures also bring up important questions about relationships of man-made waste materials, landscape, and culture.

Some  of the sculptures look like whimsical worms or insects; despite the overall “heavy” message of the show, these  are simply fun….and so highly textural that  you want to touch them. (I have to admit…my friend E and I each copped a feel—tho appearing soft, most of the rubber pieces are hard–before discovering a demonstration area near the exhibit where you can actually play with tire materials).

As the Decordova points out on its Web site:

Formally, Booker’s work is engaged in dialogue with the history of Western sculpture, from the ancient and classical tradition of the human figure through the Modernist non-objective sculpture of the twentieth century.

What sets her work apart, and significantly expands upon the history of sculpture, is her ability–with rubber tires–to create surfaces on objects that resemble skins, feathers, scales, spikes, armor, or attire.

These surfaces, in concert with their underlying forms, serve as metaphors for a potent range of emotions and psychological states.
Booker’s sculptures can seem alluring, threatening, encompassing, vulnerable, majestic, humorous, ominous, or tender.
 
I wanted to jump into “It’s So Hard to Be Green”…instead, asked E to take my photo in front of it.
AMH and Hard to be Green

In and Out refers simultaneously to the indoor/outdoor placement of the sculptures, the complex dialogues among surface/structure and mass/volume/void in each work, and also to the sexually suggestive images in some of Booker’s work.
I  confess that I didn’t catch the sexual suggestions…but maybe that’s the wanting to jump into it, part.

I was repelled (and fascinated)  by a huge bug-like sculpture,  but did find the patterns beautiful and mesmorizing.  

Throughout the indoor exhibit, I marvelled at Booker’s creativity–and, while, at first, felt a bit put off by all of the black, was  impressed with how effective it was in highlighting spatial relationships, recognizable objects, African fabric and body art patterns, and abstract form.

[Added 5-25-10: and thinking more about it–perhaps the all-black sculptures makes a further, important point about power and variation of and within black cultures, nations, communities and individuals.  Brava! AMH]

The show will be up through August 29, 2010.

—-Anita M. Harris

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




ICA’s “Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn” a Must See AKA Must See

Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn is a must-see restrospective by painter/photographer/sculptor/poet named…you guessed it:  “Roni Horn.” 

ICAAt Boston’s  Institute of Contemporary Art, the show, the first to compile such a large body of her work,  explores the changing nature of identity and perception.

In several galleries, the show  does so through photographic portraits of the artist and others at different stages of life.  

On the ICA’s first floor, photographs of the artist juxtapose images of her looking  traditionally masculine with others in which she appears “traditionally feminine–” from early childhood to the present.

On the fourth floor,   large portaits of her niece, also taken at different ages,  show slightly different expressions, moods, attitudes– are repeated, Warhol-like, in photo after photo.

Young girl--face 

Another gallery features pairs of seemingly identical photos of the heads and necks of owls and other birds taken from behind. 

Yet another includes two identical? photos of a white owl on a black perch.

Dead Owl, 1998

An ICA brochure explains  that many of Horne’s works are  “composed as pairs, series or with multiple sides, inviting us to notice subtle yet infinte difference between their parts. ”

I was particularly intrigued and impressed with Horn’s large format photographs of water in nature–roiling, calm, on rocks, with glints of sun–many taken of London’s River Thames–and Horn’s accompanying poetic commentary on the changing nature of water and our perception of it. 

Photo of water, 1999 Thames

Still Water, 1999

The “water” gallery  also includes two glass sculptures–one largely clear and white, the other mostly black–which, at times,  appear to be receptacles filled with water but have surfaces that seem to change shape. 

  Through a doorway in this gallery, the viewer can see out onto the water in Boston Harbor–highlighting all the more our involvement in/relation to/changing perception of the substance that is part and parcel of our existence–but can also destroy us.  

I also enjoyed Horn’s colorful glass sculptures–one, entitled “Pink Tons” , is the largest chunk of glass ever cast; the other, a  red  hassock-like piece with a squished-in corner that reminded me of a gigantic “gummy bear.”

Pink Tons

Both appeared to change in form and texture depending on the viewer’s vantage point. 

“Peer over the top of Pink Tons’ opaque cast sides into a seemingly liquid center that reacts to the atomsospheric changes of Boston’s light and weather. This five-ton glass cube is at once imposing and inviting, brutish yet pink, ”  the  brochure explains.

“Integrating difference is the basis of identity, not the exclusion of it,” Horn writes. “You are this and this and that….”

Not only is each work beautiful and provocative in itself–but the show as a whole,  which integrates a multitude of media and art forms,  is a brilliant expression encorporating the artist’s multiple talents and perceptions –and our own.  

—Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group. We also publish HarrisCom Blog and Ithaca Diaries Blog.