Twenty-five years ago, in a workshop for aspiring writers at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, the poet Judith Johnson Sherwin said that one of the hallmarks of a great poem is that it moves with what she called " inevitability, " with one phrase begetting the next. When I glimpsed the first wall of Cree Bruins’s installation in this year’s " Traveling Scholars " exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Sherwin’s words came back to me. I experienced that rare rush of being swept along by a visual kind of inevitability — not that I knew for an instant what was coming, but that everything that followed made spectacular, surprising sense.
My eye caught on an object I immediately recognized and at the same moment immediately knew to be strange: one of those old-fashioned black triangular photo corners. Before the days of slip-in plastic photo albums, people used to affix their photographs onto the uncoated pages of scrapbooks. To do that required " photo corners, " little triangular paper wedges with pockets. You’d position them to match the dimensions of your photo; the glue on the undersides of the photo corners made them stick to the scrapbook page, whereupon you could slip your photo into the four triangular pockets.
The photo corner I spotted, however, was the size of a computer screen, and that implied an almost unimaginably large photo — which itself wasn’t there. Instead, other photo corners randomly tiled the entire wall, some large, some minuscule, some the size of my hand, and all at perfect right angles to the ceiling and floor, as if at any moment some hand might come down from above and slip in a crazy quilt of photographs. They constituted a picture of missing pictures, an album emptied of its stories, manifest absence.
Turn the corner from the tall wall of photo corners and you’ll face what at first glance made me think I was standing before an oversized make-up mirror: a waist-level, brightly lit, maybe four-by-five-foot unit set into the wall. Although rectangular in dimension, the unit suggests the eye of a fly or the suction cups of an octopus: it’s made up of hundreds of small, colorless, tightly packed cylinders. A glance at the label proved the biggest surprise: they’re nothing other than film canisters.
The photo corners come in all sizes; the canisters come in one. The photo corners randomly occupy their wall; the canisters shape a precise grid. The photo corners lie dark and flat; the canisters sit luminous and dimensional. Yet the two elements resonate harmonically — the unimportant accouterments that attend different stages of photomaking are exalted in Bruins’s installation. Rather than occupying minor supporting roles in the creative process, they’ve been made central characters on stage. This is the installation-art equivalent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the early Tom Stoppard play that lifts two tertiary figures from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and positions them as protagonists in a poignant modern drama.
Except that Cree Bruins’s play has a third character, the film itself. On a nearby ledge that’s been made into a light table, many scraps of 35mm film lie scattered about. You’d expect to see negative images on the film, but there are none, only occasional blocks of color. Close by, in a space suggestive of a doorless walk-in closet, Bruins drapes similarly empty but entire 35mm film rolls from the ceiling. They dangle like bare willow branches, but they deliver an even greater sense of emptiness and misgiving than the installation’s other components. Maybe that’s because for the great number of us who aren’t film editors, the only time we ever look up at a film negative is in a doctor’s office.
As in one of Judith Sherwin’s " great " poems, every decision Bruins has made — the white light behind the film canisters that implies a flashbulb; the size and frequency of the photo corners, which transport us to a purely imaginary place; even the blocks of color on the exposed film, which gently confront us with our own desire to see something — registers with grace and precision and unassailable belonging. His parts fit together like the stones of a pyramid.
The Traveling Scholars program, which was founded more than a century ago, awards to both Museum School alumni and fifth-year-program students somewhere in the vicinity of $10,000 per artist. The idea is to allow artists to travel to locations that will enhance their work. Bruins went to Western Europe; others traveled everywhere from Nevada to Africa and Nepal.
Terence Hammonds went to the ’hood. There he photographed teenage breakdancers at the center of semicircles of engaged, onlooking urban youth — which means his subjects are black kids who perform on the street. Hammonds then took his candid snapshots of upended, somersaulting bodies against the backdrop of their riveted audiences, stripped out all the color except for blue, turned up the contrast so high that the clothes and the street and the sky disappeared into whiteness and left behind body parts in space, then transferred his manipulated images to the center of gold-edged, white-bordered porcelain plates. In short, he’s made breakdance souvenir ware — instead of using Old Faithful or the White House, he’s configured images of urban street ballet in a manner so abstract, you think you’re looking at Delft or Flow Blue china.
Further, Hammonds positions his plates in what looks like a movie-set version of an 18th-century French Baroque glass-fronted cabinet, complete with curved legs and tooled finials. The cabinet in turn stands against a wall of bright blue antique-looking fleur-de-lys wallpaper that every so often sports the inset of a blue breakdancer.
Hammonds’s marriage of and send-up of stereotypes — dynamic African-American urban culture posed against and within static Western European decorative art — proves both wry and engaging. It could be bolder. The artist’s technical gifts, and more important the generous reach of his humor, are immense. I look forward to his bringing those forces together in future work whose surface demands more of both his audience and himself.
Nuno De Campos’s seven identically sized (about two feet by three feet) egg-tempera panel paintings all depict the same fraction of the same woman’s seated body — the area from her knees to just above her elbows. Because the perspective is from a two-year-old’s viewpoint — your eyes put you at a level with the subject’s knees — the woman’s lap looks big, calm, inviting, almost oceanic for the gentle flowery patterns on her blue silk dress. You never see her face, and since the dress is the same in each panel, you feel as if you were watching a segment of a body in conversation; only the arm gestures change.
De Campos’s gift — he delivers an intense nonchalance with the relaxed exactitude of his imagery — allows you to feel his subject’s presence even though you don’t see her face. The subtle shifts in her dress, its shadows and creases, the intimations of her shifting thighs, prove quietly compelling.
What I don’t understand are her mannequin arms. The attention De Campos brings to her clothing, even to the finely detailed fissures of the knuckles on her hands, appears lost on her plastic, inarticulate, bloodless forearms and elbows. I suspect the artist decided to reduce the distinctness of his subject’s exposed flesh for the sake of highlighting the dynamics of her restrained movement. It’s a regrettable decision; mannequins don’t gesticulate.
Also included in this year’s " Traveling Scholars " : Jerry Russo’s mournful, static, black-and-white photographs of exclusion and exclusivity (he shoots the entrances to gated communities); Heidi Johnson’s flower-drenched oil paintings; Todd Elliott’s slick acrylics based on racecar logos; Adrian Carroll’s symbolist paintings; Julio César Roman’s evanescent installation based on the human form; and Judy Kermis Blotnick’s drawings of articles of clothing.
