Feb Gallery Round up

450 Harrison- The home of Boston's obvious galleries.

• OHT- Some kind of indistinguishable painting. Someday painters will become as jaded as I am about talking about loaded brushes and the tension of surfaces.
• Soprafina- Effectively Mixit studios show. I got no love for these works. The lone exception is Heddi Siebel's print "...nowhere on earth was there just such a situation..." which is a well conceived monoprint fantasy of an archipelago's map with some ocean going vessels and the moon. Which held my attention and kept me viewing it for a few minutes so I could enjoy the various relationships presented in the assorted images.
  
• Steven Zevitas- Julie Miller continues her OCD love fest for small circles in various colors. Someone at this gallery loves fields of small objects. Jacob El Hanani, Astrid Bowlby, and Miller all work in a similar style. Not that it is a bad thing, but it is sometimes remarkable to see the similarities in shows at a single gallery.
  
• Kingston- Sophia Ainslie- I've not liked other works by this artist, but I was blown away by the casual and open ended work in this show. Instead of getting bogged down in a single theme- plastic detergent bottles- these drawings are automatic and reveal as much about the landscape as any of her other installations, if not more. They are more like a Sarah Sze sculpture or a Lebbeus Woods conceptual architectural plan than the artist's own recent work. She also has a prodigious output in this show. It seems like she could do this all day.
• Diamond- closed when I was there. But I love the type of realism that they purvey.
• Sampson- Sculptures from Kenji Fujita. I'm never sure what to say about the sculptures that Sampson puts up. These and Taylor Davis's work both annoy me for their lovely complexities. They remind me of what Roger Scruton said about Heidegger "Being and Time is formidably difficult- unless it is utter nonsense" I think many viewers have a difficulty deciding if these sculptures are art-as-what-you-can-get-away-with or if Fujita truly believes that these works are a kind of fractured fairy tale or based on Wallace Stevens' poems. I fall on the side of believing in the artist, and was amused by the home-store materials and shoddy craftsmanship. I love the floor standing "Air Plant #1" which could be exhibited with Nathalie Miebach's work and each would enhance the other's meaning.
  
• Walker Contemporary- Ryan McLennan who hails from Richmond and VCU. Man I can't put words to these works on paper. Animals, subliminal bears made out of leaves, the white background. These works are the most interesting thing at 450 Harrison right now. You owe it to yourself to go see these in person. McLennan has kept an active gallery schedule in Richmond, LA, and other spots over the last few years. I think his work is very personal for him and is both highly cerebral and seductive visually for the viewer. I'm sure that there are some who will decry the illustrative quality to his work, but for those people, I have nothing but sympathy and the suggestion to look at the relationships portrayed in his work. For those who will disparage the meanings and relationships between the animals as PC lefty blah blah, what do you want? Greenbergian object art?
  
• Kayafas- Aaron Siskind shows some more photogravures and Beth Kantrowitz curates a show called "add and subtract" and Bruce Cratsley puts up some work. Too many works, too little conections to me. A gallery can have too much space.
  
• Carroll and Sons- Up front is Wendy Richmond. She had a few of the black and white intaglio prints shown a few years ago here and they return with some new video works to accompany them. The videos change my understanding of the intaglio versions. The videos create a sense of missing out and there is a hard time believing that they are not staged. But they aren't. This is the reflection of NY and its lack of stillness. Anywhere you are a person seems unaware that you are capturing them for a gallery show. The intaglio versions seem to be composed, and I intend both meanings- the are both polite and shaped by the artist. They seem static and poetic- time is slower and each subject is standing for themselves in their own space. Whereas the video works seem like desperate dances, motion for the sake of motion, and the subject is just another person who the artists doesn't care about or recognize as a person. In fact, that is the crux to me. It seems that the artist just looks for oblivious people to prove that people are oblivious in NY. No moments are more important than any other. They whoosh by and are replaced by another moment that you can't seem to stop from whooshing by again. No one connects. There is no composition or composing yourself for the spiral of people in the video portion. It seemed very NY and very cynical compared to the intaglio versions.