Examiner Review: "In The Making" Exhibit at the ICA

The ICA has a practice of re-imagining its permanent collections in special exhibitions, and the fourth of these shows, "In The Making" is currently on view until July 18th, 2010. Read my examination of the exhibit for The Examiner, divided into three parts by medium, as the galleries are arranged by photography, sculpture, and painting.

Part One (Photography, including Cindy Sherman, Rineke Djikstra, and Gerard Byrne)
Part Two (Sculpture, including Tara Donovan, Kader Attia, and Roni Horn)
Part Three (Painting, solely focusing on Marlene Dumas, also includes final opinions of show as a whole)

Examiner Review: Dr. Lakra at the Institute of Contemporary Art

Hello, friends. The ICA Boston is currently hosting a fantastic exhibition for the Mexican artist Dr. Lakra, whose bold and often humorous work fuses tattoo design with found imagery. It runs until September 6, 2010.

Check out my full review at the Examiner.

ICA: Shepard Fairey's "Supply and Demand"

I caught this exhibit at the ICA Boston just before I left for Germany. It serves as a general overview of the now-infamous Shepard Fairey, whose work ranges from public murals to comedic stencils to book and album covers to political posters.


By creating a set of specific, easily recognizable images and repeating them throughout much of his work, Fairey merges artistic design with self-branding. He often limits himself to a red, black, and white palette, resulting in distinct and bold pieces.

The exhibition traces his earliest artistic endeavors of Andre the Giant imagery stamped around Providence while he was attending RISD and follows them through the years of celebrity portraits, anti-war canvases, and numerous public art campaigns, landing on a gorgeous large-scale mural he created just for the show.

I enjoy Fairey's work a lot. I know that there is a lot of controversy over his appropriation of photographs and what not, but I still think he has a lot of talent with design, stenciling, and layering. His technical ability cannot be denied, even if some portions of his pieces were brought in from other sources. Many artists appropriate from photographs or film stills, but it's the way they incorporate them into original works that matters.


I love the variations in tone and texture Fairey has developed in a lot of his larger pieces. They make quite an impact.

All in all, an interesting and diverse collection of works by an already-prolific artist. It's really cool to see a street artist receive such a high-profile exhibition, lending legitimacy to the art form.

Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand is up until August 16 at the ICA. Also keep an eye out for some public works he installed around the Boston area in honor of the exhibition, like the one above I spotted in Harvard, and the now-defunct mural at Tufts University.

Shepard Fairey Mural at Tufts

I'm not sure how this happened, but apparently Shepard Fairey wanted to do a piece around Boston and chose Tufts University to do it! This is a fantastic mural positioned right outside the campus center on Talbot Ave. I love the limited colour palette and bold, patterned composition. The smaller, tiled images are great too, reminiscent of a city "Post No Bills" construction wall covered in advertising posters. I believe the piece is in conjunction with his new exhibit Supply and Demand at the ICA, which I hope to visit the next time I'm up there in March.


Here are some images of him installing the piece.
Here is information about his recent arrest during the exhibit's opening.

Tufts University Art Gallery: Dinh Q Lê and Christian Tomaszewski

Two new exhibitions at the Tufts Art Gallery debuted at the end of January. Exciting!

The main one, housed in the Tish Gallery (top floor), is titled A Tapestry of Memories: The Art of Dinh Q Lê, a survey of the Vietnamese-American artist's work. He and his family were forced to leave Vietnam when he was young, subsequently living in Thailand and the US. He has since moved back there, and much of his work examines the relationship between America and Vietnam and their images of one another.

Much of average Americans' knowledge of Vietnam of course relates to the Vietnam War, and much of that information comes from films and books relating to the event. Lê uses a lot of imagery from Apocalypse Now and Platoon to illustrate this point. In the video installation From Father to Son: A Rite of Passage, two screens positioned next to each other show footage from these films, one highlighting Martin Sheen and the other his son, Charlie Sheen.

The accompanying photo tapestries involve weaving images of films and the actual war. These tapestries are the main event of the exhibit, popping up in both rooms and incorporating multiple subjects.

Many focus on the Vietnam War, while others blend Eastern and Western religious iconography.

These works are really exceptionally pieced together. One must shift his or her eyes in different ways to see each layer. At first it can seem like a semi-abstracted mess but upon closer inspection each section comes together across multiple levels to form a complex and intriguing image. Unfortunately I couldn't get any decent photographs, but I feel it's impossible to see their full effect without being physically there, anyway.

The exhibit also showcases two embroidered canvases, a very subtle technique with figural subjects. Again, these definitely benefit from being seen in real life.

The largest piece is a "quilt" compiled from photographs that hangs from the ceiling. It is Lê's attempt to reconstruct the lost history of his own family by meshing together found postcards and photos of anonymous Vietnamese families.

As much as I enjoyed Lê's work, Christian Tomaszewski: Hunting For Pheasants

In the sculpture court are hung bold spheric lights.

The floor-to-ceiling windows are painted with thick piebald stripes, transforming the room when sunshine floods in. It is very pretty. (Images from Quabit's Flickr.)

Inside, the space has been transformed into a knee-level maze. The stripes continue all around the walls, serving as backgrounds to his imaginative portraits of people, real and imaginary, who have been assassinated, often with political motivations.

He incorporates techniques of silkscreening, collage, painting, and drawing to create eye-catching pieces resembling movie posters.

Neon lights and blocks of text pop up here and there, as well. They're all housed in the same-small-sized white frames but the images vary in measurements. I could lose myself in this room, easily, trying to piece together the stories Tomaszewski is trying to tell as a part of his wacky pop labyrinth.

The Tufts University Art Gallery is open every day except Monday from 10-5, and until 8 on Thursdays. It's free (but please donate!) and the people who work there are super nice! Both of these exhibits will be open until March 29, 2009.

Further Reading:
Boston Phoenix
Tufts Daily

HONK!: Street Art?

I suppose you could call the HONK! festival "street art", but that description doesn't quite capture the energy of this annual event. Over Columbus Day weekend, activist marching bands paraded through Mass Ave. from Davis Square in Somerville to Harvard Square: blowing trumpets, pounding on drums, circling on decorated bikes and towering above the crowd on stilts. All with different causes, it seemed that the march was not so much a focus on any particular issue, but rather a way to bring together the community in a fun, aesthetically and musically-engaging awareness of their ability to be heard. The overarching theme of this year's parade was "Reclaim the Streets for Horns, Bikes, and Feet!" Plenty of each there were, and though the tunes blasting from the horns in each band were different, each blended almost seamlessly into the next as they made their way past the crowds. Check out the photos for a taste of this eclectic event.

Open Studios: Fort Point

On Saturday the Fort Point Artist Community had an open studios event. They have a large, brick building near the Fort Point Channel with a great view of downtown. It had a vaguely winding interior layout so I felt like around any corner I could find another artist.

It was my first time ever going to one, and I was a little nervous but really enjoyed it. For those of you who haven't heard of this, open studios events are when a group of artists in a certain area organize a free showing of their works inside their studios. This gives them a chance to share their art without gallery liaison, focusing on whichever they choose to exhibit and sometimes including in-progress pieces as well. It's pretty laid back; you can look around quietly or interact with and question the artists (I shyly opted for the former). Some people had free food and drink (lots of Halloween candy!), and some economically-savvy girls were selling baked goods in the hallway. Open Studios take place in cities all over, so if get a chance look for events in your area.


My first stop was to see my drawing professor, Bob Siegelman. He works in different media, first showcasing large abstract prints with beautiful colors and a mesh of twisty splotchy lines. Then on to small ink-and-oil paintings with evocative atmospheres. Sorry, I have no pictures of these.

He also works in photography, trying to "express the need gay men often feel to create a sense of identity, within one's self and culture." They often focus on graphic sexual imagery, but the graininess of the shots lends them a certain softness.


I popped by the studio of Linda Huey, whose gorgeous, organic sculpture caught my eye from the hallway. She has small- and medium-sized pieces that draw from natural, floral forms thematically influenced by "the relationship between growth and decay". Many of her pieces are intended to be in gardens, shown by accompanying photographs of them within different leafy locations. Many of them had an almost alien feel, due to the larger-than-life bulbs and glossy vibrant colors.


Painter Dan Osterman has lovely, expressive landscapes of beaches and mountains. His slightly abstracted viewpoint and free linework make for very striking images. He also had this awesome spinning metallic sculpture hanging from his ceiling that I found fairly mesmerizing.


Bruce Rogovin creates surrealistic self-portraits by repeating his body multiple times in one image. My favorite was one of him sitting on a couch in a rather dank living room, with several nude, translucent versions of him placed around the room. It was sort of Sandy Sklogund-ish, with that suggestion of parallel dimensions. Of course I could find no pictures of them, I'm sorry, but keep an eye on him I guess and hopefully he'll put some on his website.


Bubble World! Martin Berinstein takes bubbles and fluid movement as his inspirations, photographing the effects of dyes and air in liquid mediums. Their extreme close-up compositions make for detailed, intriguing images.
His series "Air, Water and Dyes" was put on large display, as well as a mix of other works, with several focusing on spheres.


Though Laura Davidson works in a variety of media, most of her pieces on display all took a travel theme as the subject. Upon entering a wooden case with many little shelves hanging on the wall caught my eye. It featured little wooden birds and small objects scattered throughout, reminiscent of a Joseph Cornell assemblage but more twee. She had lovely small mosaics of buildings and ancient pottery in etched copper frames.


Her main output seemed to be hand-made books and cut-paper tableaus, or "tunnel books". One book I flipped through, called Mapping My World, Buildings and Bridges, illustrated various places she'd visited. It had hand-drawn maps and pop-up bridges sprawled across almost every page, along with icons of monuments and found vintage stamps.


The tableaus were multi-layered in the way of Dali's Little Theater. Laura was probably my favourite of the artists I visited; the love and attention she put into every piece was to me very apparent, so I could not help but love it too.

The last leg of this artistic journey was a visit to Lenore Tenenblatt's studio, within which I saw wonders done with wood and paint. Her assemblage-like sculptures are full of texture and depth, with interesting shapes and interplay of color. They seemed to have a comfortable familiarity that istantly drew me in, probably due to the materials she uses.

She works with both wall-mounted pieces as well as freestanding. She had some photography and painting on display as well, but I was mostly focused on the sculpture. Also the room smelled like chicken soup. Mmmm.

Other artists I checked out were bookmakers Mary McCarthy and Philip Manna and painter Caroline Muir. I picked up a pile of artist post cards, so all in all a day well spent! If you're in the Boston area, keep an eye out on these artists for future exhibitions. They're having a group show until October 24 in their gallery. Several of the Fort Point artists also teach and run workshops at the Fort Point Studio School.