--> -->
   
Film Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s



The land of signs
Art and the word as we know it
BY RANDI HOPKINS

" Lingo "
At Oni Gallery, 684 Washington Street, Boston, through May 25.
" Laura Donaldson "
At the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 1 Story Street, Cambridge, through May 23.


Five flights up in an old loft building in Chinatown, Oni Gallery is percolating its own fresh mix of art offerings, and the gallery’s dedication to giving support and shape to the new and often untested is turning this funky not-for-profit gallery into a center of significant art and performance activity. Spanning two floors, it’s a spacious and sociable space. Openings of exhibitions in the fifth-floor gallery are accompanied by a reception in the fourth-floor performance/film/readings space, which includes a couple of small tables set up in front of huge windows overlooking Washington Street — a great observation spot on a Saturday night.

One of Oni’s charms is that it provides a venue for work that might not find a home elsewhere. " Lingo, " the galley’s current show, is curated by Jennifer Schmidt and Matthew Nash, artists who are at the moment visiting faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Artists as exhibition curators is a growing phenomenon, and a fascinating one. With the proliferation of installation art, the widespread use of art itself as a subject matter for art, and the extensive critical thinking about the context in which art is seen, it’s not surprising that more and more artists have become drawn to using the gallery as their canvas, selecting, organizing and writing about other artists’ work.

" Lingo " brings together 17 artists who offer a visual look at the way we use and encounter words in roadside advertising, corporate culture, politics, personal exchanges, and much more. As Schmidt says in her statement in the accompanying CD catalogue, " I like to read into things. " Yet the work that she and Nash have assembled delves into the interworkings of language and image without letting the act of reading bog down the sensory experience. One of Schmidt’s own works here, the video " What’s in a Name? " , not only appropriates and personalizes the language of the corporate logo but subversively pairs it with a children’s song that questions our ownership of our own names. A logo incorporating the artist’s surname is seen on screen while a woman’s voice on the soundtrack sings the children’s ditty " John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt " over and over, carefully enunciating the last word, finding the personal in the widely shared, asking whether John Jacob Jingleheimer’s name might not be " my name too. "

Another work that finds the individual in the quasi-mass-marketed is the large-scale photograph Refrigerator Show, by Jennifer Ramsey and Pedro Velez. A refrigerator plastered with postcards and posters from various art exhibitions stands in an ordinary kitchen, next to the sink, near a window sill with a meandering potted plant. But this is not a " found " or random photograph; the items on this refrigerator have been arranged by Velez, who is himself both an artist and a curator. The photograph reminds us that we all organize the ephemera of our particular lives in a way that reflects our visual tastes as well as our notion of what’s interesting or important. These days, some people’s refrigerators say more about them than their bookshelves or even their CD collections.

Lisa Hecht’s photographs occupy that interesting space between documentation and art object. One photograph, part of a series called " I have been here for one month and nobody has written to me yet, " shows the interior of a European-looking bedroom, with an unmade bed and blacked-out windows onto which a handwritten text has been scratched out, backwards (so as to be read properly by people looking in from outside); the writing allows light in the shape of words to fall across the floor and walls. The text seeks a conversation with passers-by; it reads in part, " Maybe you can leave me a note that you came by. My mailbox is just to your right in front of the big tree. " It is a lovely photograph, and the words are simple but compelling — the bit of effort it takes to decipher them draws you into the writer’s desire to communicate, her vulnerability, and also her voyeurism, as she stands unseen in her room, soliciting response.

Matthew Christensen’s Erratum is simply a postcard that states, " The following text was inadvertently omitted from our conversation, please insert into your memory of our interaction where you see fit, Thank you. " There is space below for your message, and the artist has provided pencils and a mail slot into which you can drop your completed postcard, which he promises to mail. Christensen’s optimistic attempt to see the possibility of redemption in a little white postcard says something encouraging about our familiarity with the vernacular of postcards and of psycho-jargon.

It is the language of the construction site that speaks to Scott Speh, who paints on DuPont’s Tyvek (an industrial material used to wrap buildings under construction) in order to explore the language found on the ubiquitous material. Using thick white paint reminiscent of Jasper Johns, he outlines the blue-and-white corporate logo and the multilingual printed warnings to foreground the multinational language of corporate business and international development that wraps our lives while we barely notice.

Taking on the language of low-tech hype, Matthew Nash makes small black-and-white photographs of those roadside billboards with plastic clip-in letters found from gas stations to mini marts across America, as part of his ongoing series " Primitive Information Dispersal. " The photographs are presented in a large grid; each shows one sign with a message like " WE NOW HAVE FRIED CHICKEN! " or " KITCH CLO D. " Although Nash’s title signals an ironic reading, the images themselves evoke a more emotional response. To me, they form a portrait of a sad-sack former self. From the many missing or battered letters to the idiosyncratic spelling and derelict environs, Nash’s grid looks like a graveyard of once-enticing entreaties that have lost their usefulness in a world where everyone moves by a lot faster than 60 mph.

Erik Geschke constructs what look like scale models of the scaffolding and attached commercial lettering or icons that are placed atop tall buildings. His sculptures appear as if seen from behind, so that only the reversed outlines of letters or the featureless, cut-out shape of an otherwise unseen image are visible. He paints both the " message " and the structure a uniform gray, melding the media with its message and exposing its blank backside.

In the surrealist tradition of disconnects between word and image, Stefano Pasquini’s drawings, called " Unrealizeable Projects, " play with words the way cartoons play with images — he uses them to conjure situations that reality would not support. These clever drawings range from the amusing to the pointedly political. Some refer to landmarks, political figures, or current events whose messages usually come through even when you’re not familiar with the topical references. Looking at a picture of the queen of England drawn by an Italian artist and accompanied by text in English that has been sent overseas digitally to be printed out and tacked onto the walls at Oni, I conclude — and this is one of the overall themes of " Lingo " — that there is indeed something universal about the slipperiness of language as it presumes to describe reality, and something valuable in the attempt to parse out its context and content.

YOU COULD SAY that it is body language that underlies the witty and sensual work of artist Laura Donaldson, who has just been chosen as the first winner of the Cambridge Center for Adult Education’s new Barbara Singer Artist Award, an annual prize named in honor of the dedicated Cambridge gallery owner and artists’ champion who passed away last year. Intended to focus attention on a Massachusetts artist whose work should be more widely known, the award includes a cash prize as well as a solo exhibition in the CCAE’s third-floor space. Donaldson, who is also acting director of the gallery and the visiting-artist program at Montserrat College of Art, is showing work in several media that reflects her sensitivity to the curves and hollows of the human body, as well as her humor and her political bent.

Her sculpture Surrender the Pink takes the form of a delicate lady’s tea table: standing on three slim legs carved from poplar, it’s painted ballet pink to capture the feeling of a ballerina on pointe — and it wears a little gauzy skirt. This piece plays with the idea of function and form, and with the relationships of femininity, service, and beauty. Donaldson’s etchings, engravings, sculpture, and painting further explore the human form and its many associations. An impressive effort in itself, the show is also a fitting tribute to Barbara Singer’s support of artists.

Issue Date: May 16-23, 2002
Back to the Art table of contents.


home | feedback | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | the masthead | work for us

 © 2002 Phoenix Media Communications Group