E-Mail This Article to a Friend Smash hits The BCA’s 18th ‘Drawing Show’ and Emmanuel College’s ‘Wile’ BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"The 18th Drawing Show" At the Mills Gallery in the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street, through March 7. "Wile" At Lillian Immig Gallery at Emmanuel College, 400 the Fenway, through February 20.

Sure, it’s crowded. Sure, there’s an abundance of art-school art. Sure, there are gross omissions of artists not included in the show (whether they were turned away, didn’t submit, or weren’t invited). And having been disappointed by a number of its predecessors, I was ready to be ill-disposed to this year’s "Drawing Show" at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery. So much for sure.

As it stands, the 18th (biannual) "Drawing Show" is the best I’ve seen in years, with enough highlights to qualify as, if not a diamond, at least a topaz. Above all, what it has going for it is an openness of spirit. It’s got no axes to grind, no statements to make about what drawing ought or ought not to be, no exclusions of a categorical sort, and no phony inclusiveness, either. (This year, no videos are passed off as drawings.)

Thanks to the combined efforts of Laura Donaldson, newly appointed director of the Mills Gallery, and Raphaela Platow, the new curator of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis and this year’s juror, "The 18th Drawing Show" puts forward 133 works by 110 artists, the great majority of whom make their homes in and around Boston. Because of the sharpness of Platow’s eye and the number of accomplished artists willing to risk rejection, the exhibit qualifies as a full-fledged celebration of the Boston arts scene. My one reservation is that the celebration could be fuller still. The exhibit could be enhanced by inviting outstanding artists who for whatever reasons do not submit to the jury process.

I am not sure how Randal Thurston’s enormous snake of black, cut-out letters that unwinds in circles over some 60 square feet from ceiling to floor qualifies as a drawing or earns the name Golem, but I don’t care. Thurston works in paper — typically black, typically heavy duty (lighter than cardboard, stiffer than standard stationery) — that he scissors into bilaterally symmetrical shapes that allude to narratives. From a distance, a Randal Thurston silhouette resembles a sharply defined Rorschach test, but on inspection it reveals interlocking networks of identifiable shapes — guns and insects, human profiles and flora. Golem refers to the mythical creature from Jewish folklore, precursor to Frankenstein’s monster, fashioned from clay and made animate as a man. How the characters of our alphabet relate to the Golem myth is unclear, unless the artist is suggesting that the twisting symbols of our written language — in Golem the letters stretch and collapse, distend and contort — are the stuff of our own animation, that without words we’re merely clay, or that language itself is a Golem, an animate manifestation of supernatural forces. No matter. Golem enjoys an eerie, kinetic power, and it signals an important shift in Thurston’s style.

Another wall-sized work in the show, also composed of multiple, connected parts and riveting in a different way, is Andrew Mowbray’s Vanlandingham Experiment. This one is made up of 30 pairs of images; each pair comprises a candid color snapshot of a man or a woman and a picture of a face the person drew moments before the picture was taken. The name of the installation (confession: I was fully taken in by the accompanying wall text but have since been disabused of my naïveté) derives from an apocryphal Dutch philosopher who posited that "everything we create as individuals is a representation of our self." Mowbray the artist presents the grid as his test of Vandlandingham’s notion — do the random faces resemble their makers’? Despite the fictional basis of the project, you’ll be drawn in to a delightful series of double takes as you compare the simple, cartoonish drawings on the left with the photographs to the right. Yet once you learn that the whole thing’s a ruse, the fuel of your interest (looking at how people’s supposedly random, unpremeditated drawings resemble them) may run out — you may even wonder whether the subjects were actually asked to draw a self-portrait. Mowbray’s significant humor and demonstrated artistry require some fine tuning. Vanlandingham Experiment is the visual analogue of a composition by P.D.Q. Bach, and it deserves the same attention to detail.

The diminutive contributions of Rachel Perry Welty belong to a different order of humor: wry mirth. Welty’s three works in the show, two on wax paper, one applied directly to the wall, go by just two names: Chiquita #4050 and Fresh Ginger #4612. The works on wax paper are made of infinitesimally small, brightly colored paper clippings not much thicker than a hair that are arranged in delicate, cascading designs. The titles of these energetic, shimmering abstractions make no sense until you read the line that tells you what materials were employed: "One Produce Sticker on Waxed Paper." Yes, those annoying markers that ruin pears and plums, tomatoes and peaches, are redeemed in the exacto-knife-wielding hands of the artist. What is art that does not redeem?

For reasons I can’t entirely explain, I was also struck by Kathryn Klencheski’s Pieta. The 12 square feet of the four-by-three white gesso’d panel are empty except for the two football players (rendered in graphite with the precision of a photograph) in the lower right corner. One athlete carries the presumably injured or unconscious other in his arms in an attitude that accounts for the work’s title. Always at the edge of sentimentality, Pieta succeeds because of its compositional know-how. The combination of the human drama in the context of surrounding emptiness creates a kind of visual echo, emphasizing the frailty and the compassion and, because of their uniforms, the bathos. The image of the game gone wrong, the hurtful play, strikes a chord — not because it’s football and not because Klencheski’s technique is cinematic. The huge, surrounding blankness makes the accident appear to ripple infinitely outward, a cry that never stops.

If "The Drawing Show" gave an award for pure technical bravura, this year’s prize would go to John Monteiro for his exquisitely complex 1999 pen-and-ink drawing Everglades, which reads like a 19th-century engraving and an acid trip — it’s so exact, it’s crazy. A gnarled tree that erupts in lotus blossoms sprawls across the left half of the picture under a sky festooned with clouds that look as if they’d drifted in from the opening credits of Monty Python. To the right, you can see deer and egrets off in the distance as well as an island of trees, all of which are reflected, one meticulous pen stroke at a time, in a watery foreground. The sheer density of Everglades makes it a showstopper, as does the peculiar mood it strikes, part playful, part obsessive.

Colleen Kiely contributes eight wonderful drawings on paper doilies whose lightness and flimsiness is at odds with her imagery — she draws vehicles, cars and trucks, buses and flatbeds, as seen from a rear-view mirror. They’re rendered with such vital clarity that, despite the lacy edges, you think you can smell exhaust fumes. Jason White’s Bear, in which a strangely yellow man with a big belly and no chin is buried to his waist as he stares at a nearby prostrate teddy bear, proves both captivating and enigmatic. So too does Asuka Ohsawa’s stripped-down Face Studies, in which pig faces with rabbit ears suggest the emotional landscape of Hannibal Lecter. Also outstanding are Bradford Johnson’s gentle, almost pointillist drawings (he creates images from what look like Chinese letters the size of fleas), Frederick Lynch’s geometric profusions in ink (they could be magnified crystal formations), and Pat Shannon’s transgressive drawing called Several Possibilities, in which a window has been cut into a picture of a hairy egg and on the underside of the sliced paper appears a red plastic nipple.

ACROSS TOWN at the Lillian Immig Gallery at Emmanuel College, another powerful show continues through February 20. "Wile" presents the works of five artists whose creations appear utterly serious but turn out to be remarkable spoofs. Brian Burkhardt makes displays of realistic, preserved insects — they look like the sort of thing you’d see at the Peabody Museum — that seem credible largely for their psychological acuity: the Jacuzzi leech that lives in water filters, the concrete worm that can boor through brick. More amazing still are the photographs by Stephan Jacobs, which aren’t spoofs. Jacobs shoots communities of men who do re-enactments of WW1 and WW2 battle scenes. His black-and-white images of soldiers appear to be vintage photographs — every detail of the uniforms is true to their history. And yet the fullness of their faces, the clearness of their eyes, and our awareness that these men are playing at war all make the experience of his work disturbing and magnetic. Vico Fabbris’s hilarious watercolors of make-believe plants (Cervix Ceruleo, Zuni Black Tongue), Edythe F. Wright’s wonderfully obsessive "domestic archeology" project (she’s disassembled an alarm clock and presented it like a dinosaur skeleton), and Andrew Mowbray’s paintings about an apocryphal artist "obsessed with catching the smallest fish in the world" round out this exuberant show.