E-Mail This Article to a Friend Home sweet home, and abroad "Domestic Archeology" at the Rose, and Mexico at the ICA BY RANDI HOPKINS

Exciting young curators at venerable venues around town are raising the bar on what we get to look at, and this month sees the opening of two prime examples. Raphaela Platow, curator at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and Gilbert Vicario, assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, are putting Boston on the global art map with shows that, respectively, hold a magnifying glass up to our domestic spheres and fly far afield to examine a genre we thought we knew — Mexican art.

From kitchen to living room, bathroom to basement, our homes speak volumes about ourselves; their (and by extension, our) identities are as much a product of the things we just leave lying around as they are the actual items of décor. Kitchen sponges, dust bunnies, and armchairs provide fodder for five artists who function as cultural anthropologists and urban archivists in "Domestic Archeology: Boston and Beyond," which is curated by Raphaela Platow and opens at the Rose Art Museum on January 22. The methodology of these artists shares attributes with objective scientific research, but their field of inquiry is that most subjective of realms, the home.

"The theme for this show evolved from my studio visits when I first arrived here," explains Platow, who came to the Rose a year and a half ago. "It kept emerging as something that was important to artists here. The Rose has a tradition of doing shows of Boston-area artists, and when I came, there was a great deal of discussion about how to do them. I always felt that ‘local artist’ shows can be more marginalizing than elevating, and I thought it could be good to bring in outside work with cross-connections with the local work, to create dialogue with other artists."

"Domestic Archeology" brings together multimedia installations by Boston-based artists Edythe Wright, Davis Bliss, and Douglas Weathersby as well as German artist Karsten Bott and the New York–based Haim Steinbach. Meanwhile, in the Rose’s smaller Lee Gallery, Platow has organized "Minimal Factory ($1 Market)/Red Bull Party (with DJ)" by renowned Bangkok-based artist Surasi Kusolwong, complete with Thai music, energy drinks, and cheap goods available for $1 each. "This is ‘Domestic Archeology’ from the angle of global commerce," she points out. "I thought the shows would play off each other in an interesting way."

A global viewpoint also distinguishes the curatorial efforts of the ICA’s Vicario, whose exhibition "Made in Mexico" opens on January 21. The show presents work by 20 international artists who reveal Vicario’s broad and untraditional approach to his subject — in fact, only seven of the artists he has included are actually Mexican. "I was interested in rethinking Latin American art and how it is presented," he explains. "I wanted to break the mold of how this work is portrayed." To get away from the recurrent tendency to show Mexican art as though it were entirely separate from contemporary movements in art, he’s organized the show into three broad areas of investigation, looking at artists from all over the world who investigate aspects of Mexican identity as portrayed in the media and through traditional art forms, artists who explore European modernism within the context of Mexican architecture, design, and sculpture, and artists with a critical vision of the social and political situation in Mexico. From Andrea Fraser’s experimental video work building on Sergei Eisenstein’s 1930 visit to Mexico to Mona Hatoum’s collaboration with carpet weavers in Oaxaca, this show brings a fresh eye to a rich artistic tradition.

"Domestic Archeology: Boston and Beyond" and "Minimal Factory ($1 Market)/Red Bull Party (with DJ)" are at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, 415 South Street in Waltham, January 22 through March 28; call (781) 736-4204. "Made in Mexico" is at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street in Boston, January 21 through May 9; call (617) 266-5152.