Highlights
We’ve passed the Ides of March and 2025 is in full swing. Teslas are burning, the stock market is crashing, and the Black Lives Matter plaza in Washington DC has been completely demolished at the cost of six hundred thousand dollars to taxpayers. In Boston, we await some kind of tipping point, like the good revolutionaries we are. There’s no better time to be making art that will undoubtedly reflect the time we’re living in, even if only subversively. Because dissent is now a truly radical act. It’s also Women’s History Month and there are no greater radicals than women artists, blazing trails and making visible what might otherwise be ignored. Here are some highlights to celebrate.
Subscribe to the Art Spiel Weekly Newsletter. It Matters to us!
SUBSCRIBE HERE
Disintegration at Gallery Very
@gallery_very
On view through: April 5, 2025
Featuring: Audrey Goldstein, Cristi Rinklin, Dana Clancy
This three-person exhibition of two painters and a sculptor is beautifully organized to engage the work in dialogue while also honoring their individual directions. Each artist addresses the fragility of the human body and the natural environment. Audrey Goldstein’s material choices push the narrative of fragility forward, appearing as if made of loosely attached elements that are delicately assembled on thin branching structures. They’re suspended from the ceiling and move gently with the current of air around them. They look like bodies, boney and tattered, swaying in space. In some ways they remind me of Egon Schiele paintings, emaciated and delicate, but still whole in their bodily form.
Cristi Rinklin’s large-scale painting seems to anchor the exhibition and fill the viewer’s periphery with a landscape that is both beautiful in its rendering and unsettling in its composition. We see a treeline receding in the distance as the earth in the foreground shows signs of strain and stress. It’s a landscape that’s been disturbed by man or excavated by machines. It conjures the image of a giant fallen tree, its roots torn from the earth it once held onto. Or perhaps a swath of forest that has been decimated by fire; a perfectly timed metaphor for disruption in nature.
Dana Clancy’s paintings also invoke a feeling of discord in the human experience, with references to nature and human forms, disharmonious through fractured abstractions. We glimpse figures and landscape, silhouetted and detailed alongside each other or juxtaposed to accentuate the frenetic energy of impermanence, disintegrating at the same time they solidify in our eyes.
Garnish, The Artists Chair, and Scaling a Pyramid at Boston Sculptors Gallery
@bostonsculptorsgallery
On view through: March 30, 2025
Featuring: Kyle Browne, Mags Harries, Jonathan Latiano
Boston Sculptors Gallery, a cooperative art space in the SoWA arts district of Boston, is hosting three wonder exhibitions. Upon entering the gallery you are greeted by the “Launchpad” space, which is allocated to host non-members in a solo show. Kyle Browne has transformed the space into an intimate corridor of delicate objects, inviting visitors to navigate through the collection while being careful not to bump into anything.
The awareness of one’s own body is met by other body parts, like hands, tongues, fingers, and vulvas. Using oyster shells as a parallel to vulvas, these small sculptures are both humorous and poignant. These are Browne’s Sacred Bivulva’s and they entrance the viewer while knowingly provoking their sensitivities to the subject matter. Textures allude to soft forms that are in concert with hard ones. Brittle materials like glass and seashells sit against seemingly soft forms of flesh. Reflections in small mirrors extend the space that they occupy. Objects appear wet and perishable, reminding us of the ephemeral quality of food and mood.
In Mags Harries’ work, the artist’s studio chair becomes an integral space for creativity. It’s a spot that the creator continually returns to throughout the process of making their work. To create the work Harries borrowed chairs from several artist friends and had them scanned to make a miniature 3D print. She then includes an image of the artist in their chair, along with a QR code that takes the viewer to a YouTube video of the artist talking about their beloved chair. It’s a wonderfully elegant and relatable idea, and one that honors a little-recognized collaborator and tool in the artist’s studio.
Jonathan Latiano’s 1:5700th scale version of The Great Pyramid of Giza is constructed using tiny grains of coral sand. Each grain has been photographed and turned into prints that surround the sculpture, covering the walls of the gallery like wallpaper. The miniscule sculpture itself sits on a pedestal in the middle of the gallery. The ideas of scale and time are activated while the entire work acts as an installation. The natural material of the sand loses its nature by being held together with epoxy in a pyramid shape, sitting on wood, and underneath glass. The delicate nature of the original object plays against the numerous photographs and you feel a deep sense of displacement from the beach in which the sand came from.
In the Meantime at Lamontagne Gallery
@lamontagne_gallery
On view through: March 29, 2025
Featuring: Elizabeth Mooney
Elizabeth Mooney’s paintings satisfy the eye with dense imagery and luscious surfaces. Technique abounds while coded visuals and referential objects pique the curiosity of the viewer. Her paintings are about human intervention in the natural world, but none of the elements look organic. Instead, her approach highlights the synthetic nature of manmade objects, with all the gloss and high chroma of those materials, and insinuates that connection with illustrative renderings of nature.
Nature peaks its head out of the work in ways that are reminiscent of Neil Welliver’s highly detailed deconstructions of nature, keeping color and shape in their ordered arrangement. Mooney’s arrangements blend more and allow for an intertwining that pulls the viewer in and inspires a treasure hunt of familiar objects, colors, and shapes. In this configuration, abstract markmaking, gesture, and material play contribute to an aesthetic that is uniquely hers.
There’s also a digital quality to these paintings that reminded me of Photoshop collage and digital drawing, but there’s nothing virtual about the surfaces of these paintings except that they’re a Field Day, treating the eye with formal elements that range from spraypaint to stenciled impasto passages. They’re playgrounds for viewers who love the materiality of paint – author included – and provide endless rewards for longer looking.
Bite of the Bitch at LaiSun Keane Gallery
@laisun_keane
On view through: March 30, 2025
Featuring: Jen Deluna
Jen Deluna’s paintings are beautifully rendered bursts of energy that zoom past the eyes in a blur. There’s a feeling of urgency in the way the paintings present themselves as if to alert the viewer of a passing memory. The paintings take their conceptual foundation from classical art motifs and feminine power, doubling the latter with the potential for monstrous confrontation. I was reminded of the scientific theories behind facial recognition. Our memories are more adept at remembering faces as a whole instead of their individual parts. In a close-up, we do not remember people’s faces by their details. Deluna’s zoomed-in view of her subjects assists in giving us an overall view of a face devoid of further details and half submerged in an opaque glaze. Some of the smiles on those faces are as disturbing as the paintings of Yue Minjun. I also recognized a derivation of Marilyn Minter’s glossy portraits, complete with sweat, saliva, or oily patina on flesh. There’s something about a lover’s glance that makes these portraits so slick and glossy, and the effect works. Combined with Deluna’s blurring effect, we get a fleeting glimpse of her subjects, content in their action: smiling, snarling, staring, glancing… Their physical form mimicking flesh while looking like synthetic humanoids made of plastic or wet vinyl. Their details are compelling, but their identities are strange and anonymous.
All photos courtesy of Andrew Fish unless otherwise credited.
Make your tax-deductible donation today and help Art Spiel continue to thrive. DONATE
About the writer: Andrew Fish is a Boston-based artist and educator. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and received his MFA from Goddard College in VT. His work has been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad. Fish teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA. @Andrew_Fish_Studio
Related Articles:
Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in February 2025
Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in December 2024
Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in November 2024
Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in October 2024
Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in September 2024
Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in August 2024
Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in July 2024