For Immediate Release
April 23, 2008
Contact: Corey Cronin 781/259-3628
The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition
Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery, James and Audrey Foster Galleries,
Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Media Space, Grand Staircase,
Window Gallery, Arcade Gallery, and Fourth Floor Hallway
May 10 – August 17, 2008
(free opening reception: May 15 from 6 - 9 pm )
LINCOLN, MA — The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition features a diverse selection of artwork created by 12 artists/artist teams: Mitchel K. Ahern, Matt Brackett, Leah Gauthier, The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, Niho Kozuru, Eva Lee, Yana Payusova, David Prifti, Kirsten Reynolds, Mark Schoening, Vanessa Tropeano, and Marguerite White. The exhibition will be on view in Museum’s galleries from May 10 – August 17, 2008 (the opening reception will be held on May 15 from 6 – 9 pm ). DeCordova is also offering a full slate of programs in conjunction with this exhibition.
Originally titled the Artists/Visions series, the DeCordova Annual has showcased the works of emerging, mid-career, and established artists since 1989. This exhibition emphasizes the quality and variety of artworks rather than any single or overarching theme. Each year the DeCordova Annual seeks to feature a selection of the most interesting and visually eloquent artists working in the New England region, and celebrates the creativity and vitality of our own visual arts community.
The DeCordova Annual is the backbone of the Museum’s exhibition program, solidly reflecting our mission. The series also reinforces DeCordova’s commitment to regional artists, and its leadership position in celebrating contemporary art in New England . The artists for each year’s Annual are selected by DeCordova’s director and curators and each show is carefully organized to reflect varieties of medium, style, subject, and content. All decisions are made by consensus—all the curators must agree upon on the choice of each artist.
The exhibition is organized by Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Curator Nick Capasso, Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch, and Koch Curatorial Fellow Kate Dempsey. The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition has been funded by the Deborah A. Hawkins Charitable Trust.
Click here for artist statements and images.
For 2008, the following 12 artists/artist teams from three New England states will be featured:
Mitchel Ahern (Swampscott, MA) prints/performance/installation—Ahern interweaves ideas about text, textiles, and politics. In one installation, responding to the use of advertising imagery and copy on domestic items, Ahern transforms dishtowels. These common kitchen items are re-imagined as flags and banners, making them pointedly political and provocative—propaganda should live in our kitchens, wiping dishes, and mopping up spills. In Ahern’s monumental scrolls based on Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, famously typed on one unbroken roll of paper, he turns the history of books backwards. Letterpress technology was developed to mass-produce books in the now familiar codex (bound pages) format. Here, Ahern uses hand-cut type to print text on unique scrolls, the ancient book format rendered obsolete by the codex. This historical inversion, coupled with the sheer size of the scrolls, underscores the political and cultural significance of Kerouac’s work.
Matt Brackett (Somerville, MA) paintings—Brackett paints mysterious, quasi-allegorical narratives in a style that is precise, elegant, and traditional. Influenced by masters such as Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, Brackett skillfully captures light, atmosphere, landscape, and figures. Whether the setting is an interior, seaside, or mountain top, Brackett instills his paintings with a feeling of reality while at the same time creating puzzling narratives through his staging. Each painting has meaning for the artist, but enough ambiguity to allow the viewer to meditate on his or her own struggles. The perplexing narratives of these paintings mirror the uncertainties we all face in life.
Leah Gauthier (Boston, MA) installation/performance art—Gauthier places agriculture in a cultural context—the museum—and asks the viewer to re-imagine the growing, harvesting, preparation, and consumption of food so that we may re-connect with some of humanity’s most fundamental activities. When the behaviors and attitudes, usually reserved for Art, are brought to bear on Food, our relationships to what nourishes us can change. The beauty of plants and fruits is more manifest, mundane picking and cooking become performed and observed rituals, and eating can be a sacrament. A simple shift in physical context allows us to experience, if even fleetingly, a much older, and perhaps much wiser, connection to nature and our physical being.
The Institute for Infinitely Small Things (Waltham, MA) installation/performance art—As a performance collective The Institute for Infinitely Small Things investigates the nature of public space through a mixture of pseudo-social research and street theater. One of the Institute’s focuses is how public spaces have been affected since September 11, 2001 . Regular security checks, blockaded open plazas, and racial profiling have permeated our public lives to sometimes unquestioned degrees. To underscore and chart this cultural shift, Institute members will perform security procedures at DeCordova during the Annual exhibition. In addition, an installation of their interactive publication, The New American Dictionary, which is a collection of over 50 terms that have emerged in the past seven years, will be on view.
Niho Kozuru (Boston, MA) sculpture—Taking casts of architectural and botanical details first, Kozuru then combines those parts to create new sculptural forms in rubber. The material’s appealing, textured, gelatinous surfaces look almost edible, and the rich hand-dyed colors of amber, red, yellow, and green add to the sculptures’ seductive qualities, which are further enhanced when light passes through them. Kozuru’s innovation lies in her ability to change the physical material of a form and therefore its meaning. Decorative architectural elements, industrial machine parts, and forms found in nature take on new interpretations as they become part of the artist’s vocabulary—enshrined, preserved, and transformed into something truly different.
Eva Lee (Ridgefield, CT) video installations/drawings—In her arrestingly beautiful video installation, Lee literally creates an emotional terrain. Lee uses information, gathered by the left brains of scientists, and processes that data through the right brains of artists to yield images and objects that provide an overlay of emotional, psychological, and spiritual qualities on seemingly objective phenomena. In this way, a more holistic vision of human inquiry is revealed. Science is driven by passion, and art is informed by observable and quantifiable materials and technologies. In her work, fraught with feelings, emotions are not applied to or elicited from existing landscapes, but are built into the structure and appearance of brand new worlds.
Yana Payusova (Boston, MA) paintings/drawings/mixed media collages—The overlapping of myth and memory are the basis for Payusova’s densely packed, semi-autobiographical paintings. They humorously depict the absurdity and frustrations of her experiences growing up in St. Petersburg , Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. Combining stories and photographs from her childhood, with tales told to her by her parents, Payusova uses a variety of techniques to suggest the way family history is distorted by time and memory. Filled with narrative scenarios, where events are presented almost like graphic novels without the text, the artist presents different incidents from her stories simultaneously, conflating both time and space.
David Prifti (Concord, MA) photographs—Prifti prints his portraits using the historic wet plate collodion process (think tintypes) to create a smooth printing surface, which results in virtually grainless images containing a wide range of creamy silver tones. The long exposure times require great concentration from both artist and subject, producing psychologically charged images. Some of his photographs feature a community of people who alter their bodies in painful ways and gather to suspend themselves from their piercings. These portraits maybe difficult for some viewers to look at, yet Prifti’s caring eye captures elegant compositions, and the medium with its glowing, velvety tones won’t let you turn away.
Kirsten Reynolds (Newmarket, NH ) installation—Reynolds investigates the relationship between our experience, knowledge, and environments through large-scale installations. Ironically titled What You See Is What You Get, Reynolds’ site-specific installation is a multilayered play on realism, expectation, and perception. The stage-like tableau waits for us to enter as both viewers and actors but defies our expectations at every turn—nothing we see is what we get. The tumbling planks of wood are in fact painted foam, the characters that populate Reynolds’ world are impossible to identify, the architecture is frozen somewhere between construction and collapse, and, as much as we try, no cohesive story emerges from this chaotic scene. In this unresolved setting, Reynolds tests our experience and vision against what we think we know, aiming at the space in between.
Mark Schoening (Boston, MA) paintings—Compressing techniques and influences that range from Sumi ink drawings, Abstract Expressionist painting, Sci-Fi and graphic novels, and the work of scientific photographer Harold Edgerton, Schoening employs painting and printing to visualize the rapid pace of our information-rich era. His densely layered canvases capture the controlled chaos of “information explosions,” not unlike Edgerton’s famous flash freeze photographs. Schoening begins each canvas with a gestural painting to “set the stage” and then responds to it with digitally manipulated architectural forms that he then transfers onto the canvas, on top of the paint. This exchange repeats until these works become condensed visual expressions of the age-old dialogues between old and new, control and chaos, and the rational and irrational sides of human nature.
Vanessa Tropeano (Lexington, MA) photographs—Tropeano stages her large, sensuous, color photographs to create open-ended narrative scenes. It may seem odd to describe Tropeano’s images as narratives, since most of them do not include people and therefore look more like landscape or still-life images. Instead, as our eyes travel across each photograph, we notice subtle clues, like a woman’s high heel shoes in the fire, a branch stretching onto the ice, or upside-down feet at the very bottom of an expanse of white sky. In these constructed tableaus, Tropeano recreates stories from her family’s history, whether true, apocryphal, or somewhere in between. And while we may not know the source of the story, we are caught up in the allure and mystery of these ordinary yet perplexing places.
Marguerite White (Newtonville, MA) installation—White’s installations are about time and memory, employing harbor imagery as a focal point for these larger concepts. Harbors are places of constant change; boats and people come in and out and detritus takes on new meaning out of context, pulled by the tides. With drawings, vinyl cut-outs, and natural and projected light, White creates a palimpsest of nautical imagery that evolves and shifts continually. She sets us adrift in time by referencing historic imagery while also calling attention to our current misgivings about harbors as sites of potential security threats. With a mix of images making up her narrative, White creates a space that is both fluid and disorienting, a place where you can become, even momentarily, lost on this continually shifting waterline.The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition Programs
Gallery Talks: Meet the Artists
Third Floor Lobby
Selected Saturdays at 3 pm
Free with Campus admission
The act of creating artwork can be just as exciting as looking at the final product. Meet New England artists as they discuss their work on view in The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition.
May 17: Mark Schoening June 21: Vanessa Tropeano
May 24: Eva Lee July 19: Matt Brackett
May 31: David Prifti
June 21: Vanessa Tropeano
July 19: Matt Brackett
Many of The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition artists will also be giving performances; these are scheduled for selected Saturdays and a Sunday:
May 24: The Institute for Infinitely Small Things will perform Everything is in Order from 12 – 2 pm
June 14: Mitchel Ahern, Artist Talk and performance at 3 pm
June 15: The Institute for Infinitely Small Things will perform Everything is in Order from 12 – 2 pm
August 16: Leah Gauthier, Artist Talk and performance at 3 pm
Eye Wonder Family Program
Museum Galleries
Selected Sundays, drop-in from 1 – 3 pm
Free with Campus admission
Eye Wonder focuses on “seeing” and “doing” in art museums and combines careful looking with creative art projects centered on DeCordova’s changing exhibitions. Eye Wonder celebrates the uniqueness of contemporary artists and their processes with family-friendly guided tours and hands-on art activities. This drop-in program is perfect for families with children ages 6 and up. The upcoming programs will be centered on The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition. The following artists will host:
May 18: Kirsten Reynolds
June 1: Leah Gauthier
July 27: Marguerite White
August 3: Mark Schoening
Bank of America’s Museums on Us™
DeCordova is proud to be a participant in Bank of America’s Museums on Us™ program. Beginning in May, all visitors who present a valid Bank of America ATM, debit or credit card, along with photo identification will receive free general admission to DeCordova’s campus on the first weekend of each month until April 2009. This program excludes special events.
General Information: DeCordova is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm and on selected Monday holidays. New! General admission during Museum hours is $12 for adults, $8 for senior citizens, students, and youth ages 6–12. Children age 5 and under, Lincoln residents, and Active Duty Military Personnel and their dependents are admitted free. The Sculpture Park is open year round during daylight hours. The Store @ DeCordova and the School Gallery are open Monday through Thursday, 9:30 am to 7:30 pm , Friday through Saturday, 9:30 am to 5:30 pm , and Sunday 10:30 am to 5:30 pm . The Café @ DeCordova is open Tuesday from noon to 3 pm, and Wednesday through Sunday from 11 am to 4 pm. Guided public tours of the Museum’s main galleries take place every Thursday at 1 and Sunday at 2 pm. Tours of the Sculpture Park are given on Saturday and Sunday at 1 pm from May to Oct. All guided public tours are free with Campus admission. Visit www.decordova.org or call 781/259-8355 for further information.
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