Art can be a weird kind of magpie, drawn to glittery bits it finds in the pages of Vogue Italia or Architectural Digest, the bins at Newbury Comics, or the assembly line at Ford, bits it then hauls back to its own little corner to weave into something visual it can call its own. The coming season’s exhibitions reflect on, among other things, glass houses, our bodies/our car interiors, and the personal toll taken by AIDS and other modern horrors.
Questions about high-modernist architecture and global politics lured Chicago-based artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle to create three enormous video installations in the new Lois Foster Wing of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (415 South Street, Waltham; January 24–April 7). Each video explores a famously austere building designed by the great 20th-century architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a dogmatic idealist who believed people could live more purely in glass houses, and that transparency would bring us together. Presented in stark aluminum armatures that envelop the viewer, the videos mimic the architecture they examine. " Chic Clicks: Creativity and Commerce in Contemporary Fashion Photography, " at the Institute of Contemporary Art (955 Boylston Street, Boston; January 23–May 5), looks at a new breed of contemporary commercial fashion photographers, and at several fine art photographers — including Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Collier Schorr — who have worked with fashion companies and magazines. Both the fashion and the photography in this show should prove an interesting alternative to Herb Ritts, Horst, or any of those glamor dudes we’ve seen so much of lately. In the exhibition’s Fashion Lounge, visitors can browse through the latest art and fashion magazines and view videos by the artists in the show.
Moving us from our closets to our cars, " Surrounding Interiors: Views Inside the Car, " at the Davis Museum and Culture Center at Wellesley College (106 Central Street, Wellesley; February 21–June 9), gets right inside our psyches with auto-oriented works by artists including that late great master of the psycho-twisted car interior, Ed Kienholz, and his collaborator/wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz.
Knit booties and Bootsy Collins collide in " Xenobia Bailey: Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk — Phase II, " at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (230 the Fenway; January 18–February 17). Bailey sounds like a kind of African-American William Blake — if Blake had been handy with a crochet hook. She crafts her own cosmology out of social and cultural experiences, including 1960s counterculture, traditional African rituals, and the rites and celebrations of rural Southern sharecropping families. Presiding over the exhibit with her own oracular revival tent is Sistah Paradise, a crocheted sculpture standing nine feet tall that’s described as embodying the mystical presence of a matriarchal deity.
Utopian philosophy and revolutionary iconography come into play in the colorful, glittery paintings of Carrie Moyer, at the Gallery @ Green Street (Green Street MBTA Station, Jamaica Plain; January 11–February 9). And the Anglo-American myth of Manifest Destiny comes under scrutiny in " Deborah Bright: Manifest, " at Bernard Toale Gallery (450 Harrison Avenue; January 2-26). Bright photographs old stone walls across New England to document the first inroads made by early white settlers into the American wilderness.
Personal biography and belief systems play a more haunting role in the exhibition " AA Bronson: Mirror Mirror, " at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center (20 Ames Street, Cambridge; February 7–March 31). Bronson is the sole surviving member of the Canadian conceptual art collective General Idea, which he formed with artists Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal in 1969. From its inception until the deaths of Partz and Zontal in 1994 from AIDS-related causes, General Idea produced incisive and subversive work in a dizzying variety of media. At the List Center, Bronson will show photographs, installation works, wall paintings, and videos dealing with his own personal loss, larger issues of human suffering, and the transient and illusory nature of life and love.
As for the illusory nature of nature — and continuing the very nice series that presents large-scale contemporary artworks in the Renaissance Courtyard in Worcester — " Julian Opie: Wall at WAM " will be on view at the Worcester Art Museum (55 Salisbury Street, Worcester, in February and March). In British artist Opie’s world, people, pets, buildings, and landscapes are realized in a characteristically simplified linear style and with elementary shapes (he did the portraits of the members of Blur for the cover of their boxed set). He’ll be doing a group portrait for the Wall at WAM.
And two shows that opened in the old year but are continuing into the new deserve mention: " The Drawing Show, " at the Boston Center for the Arts (539 Tremont Street, Boston; through February 10), and " Extreme Connoisseurship, " at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University (32 Quincy Street, Cambridge) and the adjoining Sert Gallery and Cafe (through April 7).
