Boston Center for the Arts: Exhibition Catalog

Curated by Jennifer Hall

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Exhibiting Artists:

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Leika Akiyama Silvia Lรณpez Chavez Aileen O. Erickson Kate Gilbert Ruth Ginsberg-Place Rebecca Greene Gisela Griffith Alex Khomski Georgina Lewis Marilyn Mase Selina Narovlansky Robert Rovenolt Miriam Shenitzer Konstantin Simun Beverly Sky David Addison Small

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Placemaking Objects: Artist Studios Building Exhibition July 28–September 25, 2016 Curated by Jennifer Hall Placemaking Objects presents 16 small-scale works by 16 artists with studios on the BCA campus; artists who work in proximity to each other, yet whose art evidences a divergent range of experiences and outlooks.

As exhibition curator Jennifer Hall writes:

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The works in this exhibition hold on to the places from which they came—rubbage from a city street, a mishap from the artist’s studio, a pile of dirt reformed. Some are a site of visual abstraction. Others, the space of a narrative. Certain objects describe a psychological location. Perhaps an emotional situation: trauma, pleasure, or a laughable moment. Each object creates its own enclosure. Each is an isolated shelter of significance.

When objects are brought together for exhibition, their divergent places of origin align in a spatial collage, persistent in their sovereignty, yet capable of expansion. Each object, with its own history of place, now hangs next to another. We expect them to be good neighbors within this new residence. And yet, a rupture is evident between the individual place of each object and the exterior relationships with the other objects. Placement exposes both the potential and the pressure of cohabitation. The objects’ interiority and exteriority simultaneously bind them to and repel them from each other.

Each object has the ability to show to us its autonomy, negotiate its mutual connectivity and build a new place of being among its community.

Curator Jennifer Hall is an artist philosopher who makes work about embodied, distributed, situated and enactive cognition. She is currently a Professor of Art Education at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and is Coordinator of the department’s graduate programs.

above and below: Mills Gallery installation view

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Leika Akiyama Green Ring, 2013 Encaustic, oil paint 4 Ă—4 Ă— 1 inches Courtesy of Sand T Kalloch Organized color, texture and form, placed into an unusual situation, provide a platform for questioning boundaries. There is a leakage outside the border. It may be an opening up of a territory or a depletion of the closed system. In either case, there is an event of change occurring and certain thresholds of containment have been passed. An irreversible and abrupt environmental change is underway. On this surface, an expanding chaos coalesces into order, followed by chaos, and then again to order. There is evidence of spontaneity experienced through a pushing; an inviting exhale, past entropy through the pressure of change.

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Silvia López Chavez Urban Wild, 2012 Gelatin monoprint, ink, gouache, color pencils, graphite and watercolor on paper 20½ ×16½ inches Urban environments are additive and uniquely layered. Overlapping ladders, wires and industrial fencing expose the connectivity and boundaries of the city, creating a new visual matrix. Urban existence challenges organic forms and embodiment within these spaces ironically confronts our survival. As cities are also a place of multiple possibilities, they remain a harsh reminder of our inability to grasp the powers at work in worlds of our own construction.

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Aileen O. Erickson HOUSE, 2015 (detail) Objects on panel 12 Ă— 12 Ă—

inches

Construction with stones suggests a strong foundation—a place of home as a commitment. These are rocks brought together as a collective, a family of stones that hails from Maine, with a caveat: a father who studied geology. The configuration of materials suggests a tectonic history and characteristics of fractured systems affecting the balance of place. The pressboard and paint offer a background of chaos against a line of order.

There are no compression members in the foundation, no pushing against ground to claim territory but rather a wanting, formed from the simple shape of a house.

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Kate Gilbert Relative Mass, 2015 Found concrete, gold leaf and modeling turf 6 × 13½ × 7 inches Many of the streets and walkways in downtown Boston are layered on fill, claiming land from the sea. This causes extreme physical stress to the elasticity of the concrete topcoat. New construction is continually activating the surface, bringing older material up. The life cycle of the pavement in Boston is shorter than the average life span of the people who inhabit the same streets. There are corrosive aspects of living in an urban environment with shifting terrain. Reclamation digging is continually activating the surface with new silica materials that creates a creep of conflict, always pushing the older material to the surface. Here, the potential of mitigation within the environment emerges.

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Ruth Ginsberg-Place Sunlight and Shadows, 2016 (detail) Woodcut monotype. Akua soy based pigments on Arches BFK paper 13½ × 19¾ inches When our eyes rest upon a place with shadows, we become aware of the ubiquitous role of shifting light in our lives. This dappling bridges the gap between random chaos and predictable determinism, leaving us residing in the flux of space in between. These inbetween spaces are pathways through which outcomes are created. They illuminate interactions that can provide an understanding of our interplay with the world. To question why certain things happen, we need to see how they are produced. Every time we turn our gaze to the complexity of a world of extremes we are using a hidden lens to interpret the influence of our own presence.

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Rebecca Greene Feathers, 2016 Cardboard, acrylic paint 7 × 9 × 3½ inches Little pressure is left to stay in the frame. The content is now free to take off to wherever it desires. Plumology tells us that feathers are considered the most complex structures found in vertebrates. The repetition of their own structural integrity, as well as the placement in relation to each other, offer a solid yet malleable and unbounded surface in which to escape even the tightest of containments. In relationship to the frame, the plumage asserts the fragility of its own construction.

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Gisela Griffith Answers that cannot be Questioned: Suspending Disbelief, 2016 Oil on panel, wood frame 15 × 13¼ × 2½ inches Suspending disbelief involves letting go of rational thought, allowing for new ways out of indoctrinations. The frame no longer holds the painting in constraint and the painting no longer needs to build value by pushing itself against the formalities of the frame. The usual metaphors and analogies no longer apply and both oil on panel and wood frame stand for themselves.

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Alex Khomski Ladies and Gentlemen, 2015 Old photograph, mixed media on wood Three panels, each: 4 × 5½ × 1½ inches Chunking is the collecting and associating part of memory to other memories in order to construct a narrative. This process is part of why collections or series of objects are so pleasing to us—they provide numerous avenues for chunking together parts of things that help us create webs of meaning.

Knowing that the saint on the icon is a real person, that a photograph has a history, or that some decay on the surface is a natural artifice of time becomes less significant. A new life is created and bound together in the experience of observation. Through the recognition of chosen parts, interconnectivity and association, a personalized importance is reformed.

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Georgina Lewis untitled (Valence P1000873), 2016 Digital print 16 Ă— 20 inches Geological cementation is commonly understood as the introduction of chemical precipitates between individual grains of sediment. Human digestion is not unlike this process as it is a rhythmic contraction of muscles that begins the compression of loose foods into solid material.

Through a process of shifting pressures, the result is a lithification from loose sediment into a cohesive mass. Some materials defy this process.

Some start as cohesive substance designed to be machinated but never broken down and pass through the compression process without extreme transformation. In the small country setting of Valence d’Agen, France, a wad of chewing gum was photographed on the sidewalk.

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Marilyn Mase Figures, 2016 India ink on Stonehenge paper 22 × 30 inches En plein air is an invention of sorts—the invention of portable drawing sticks as part of an entire studio in a box. When a plein air drawing is brought back to the studio and later worked on from memory, an amalgamated set of representational systems collide. From the fast and spontaneous to the crafted and introspective, the object becomes a hybridity of place through direct representation and memory. This offers the realization that all landscapes have a kind of elasticity to them.

We create place through the rupture of location and memory.

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Selina Narovlansky House, 1987, from a series of preparatory drawings for the installation “Children’s Art Center Project, Moscow”, 1987–1988 Pencil and ink drawing on rice paper 11 × 8½ inches The space of a children’s after school art program is unwrapped and lays flat. Here is evidence of graceful symmetry and beautiful geometry. Every surface divided by endless diagonals—the bounded boxes suggesting infinity through mathematical equations. Each also marks what the shape strives to provide; a hopefulness of use. The object is both a critique of graphic space and a commentary for the subjects, which will live within. As the geometry draws attention to the architectural form, it also emphasizes the child, the learning and creativity through play.

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Robert Rovenolt Vertigo, 2015 Magazine photographs, plastic logo, photo-safe adhesive on wood and Masonite panel. NYT spread—aro space—tag from clothing 12 × 12 × 1 inches The collage creates an open-ended narrative interlocking the tropes of cinema with a variety of physical materials. As with the process of objet trouvé, each graphic element is deployed with minimal modification.

Signification occurs between elements—how they are placed in relationship to another. The relocation of all graphic elements constitutes a modification and changes our perception of their utility, lifespan and status. Deploying techniques of collage together with objects from film acts to bind cinematic theory back to gallery art.

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Miriam Shenitzer Hannah Arendt Is Not Chosen for the School Play, 2014 Watercolor stick 14ž × 11 inches Young Hannah Arendt is faced with a predicament and may be filled with anxiety, perhaps even existential alienation and isolation. Exposing one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century in this position uncovers her vulnerability. She also becomes a meme for the illusive authority of the intellectual discourse that has been built around her. Arendt maintains that individuals reveal themselves as distinct personalities—a space of appearance. It is not enough to exist like others, one must make each human appearance explicit. When young Arendt has not been chosen, it places pressure upon her own appearance and challenges the significance of her philosophy.

Konstantin Simun Cosmos, 2015 (detail) BLACK STAR

Plastic and metal WHITE-DWARF STAR

Plastic and metal DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

Fiberglass Dimensions variable Dmitri Shostakovich’s music has been characterized by sharp contrasts and elements of the grotesque. The sound is direct, coarse, perhaps even primitive because the individual notes do not easily blend together. The work of Shostakovich is a reminder that constellations are more than our wayfinding through cosmos of largeness—they also hold their singular importance. A sculpture of a person is found on the street and is collaged into an installation of other objects found on the street. Each singular element has importance. In systematic cosmology, all things hold their own place in a universe. What is more direct than finding a sculpture of a person on the street and putting him within his own cosmos?

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Beverly Sky Additional photographs by David Licata

December Meanderings, At the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, 2016

Artist’s Book: Fabric collage, poetry and photographs inkjet printed on cotton, hand and machine stitched 11¾ × 9 × 1 inches (closed) 16½ inches across, when open Poems and photographs inspired by walking trails in the surrounding woods on the campus of Sweet Briar College. The winding and indirect course that these materials take to create an artist’s book is part of the intricacy of its making. The drift of a walk takes the focus away from everyday distractions.

Where there is no sidetrack or tangent, only a particular portion of space presents itself at any one moment. This is a rarefied atmosphere where the denseness of embodied experience rolls out onto the surface of the book as dignified memories.

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David Addison Small Congregation, 2016 Oil and egg tempera (Mische technique) on wood panel 13½ × 11 inches The depiction of cloaked friars or monks who are looking for a home provides a theme for the traditional technique of layering paint slowly and meticulously building up a surface on a canvas. The landscape is the woods and fields around rural New England with the additional dream of the landscape of Wales. Methods of layering paint and place include the use of different substances and materials, lived experiences, imagined places, all of which go to make up a modern revival of method and concept of place.

About the BCA

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Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) is a not-for-profit performing and visual arts complex that supports working artists to create, perform and exhibit new works; builds new audiences; and connects art to community. The BCA serves arts audiences through exhibitions, live performances and community events, and supports artists through affordable studio, rehearsal and performance space on the historic South End site. The BCA’s two-acre campus is home to hundreds of working artists, as well as several not-for-profit arts and educational groups that provide a wide spectrum of services.

Program Supporters We are grateful to the Joan Mitchell Foundation for their support

Institutional Supporters

bcaonline.org

2016–2017 MILLS GALLERY EXHIBITION PROGRAM Placemaking Objects: Artist Studios Building Exhibition, curated by Jennifer Hall July 28 – September 25, 2016 Fertile Solitude, curated by Elizabeth Devlin October 14 – December 18, 2016 “I Dread to Think…”, curated by Liz Blum January 13 – March 19, 2017 23

Alida Cervantes, curated by Candice Ivy April 14 – June 25, 2017

Mills Gallery hours of operation Wednesday 12 – 5 pm Thursday, Friday and Saturday 12 – 9 pm Sunday 12 – 5 pm

Mills Gallery | Boston Center for the Arts 551 Tremont Street | Boston, MA 02116

front cover and p. 7 : Kate Gilbert, Relative Mass, 2015; photo credit: Dominic Chavez back cover above: Ruth Ginsberg-Place, Sunlight and Shadows, 2016 (detail) back cover below: Georgina Lewis, untitled (Valence P1000873), 2016 24