Every once in a while the city needs a show like "Elsewhere," the round-up of 17 local artists organized by Flux.Boston blogger Liz Devlin, to get a snapshot of the art being produced here.The quality is mixed. Sigh. But the news from Devlin: check out Boston's pleasant goth/psychedelic surrealism. Including Juan Travieso's catchy paintings of monkeys clutching pink cones, Molly Segal's feral watercolors of fighters and fuckers, Nathan Fried-Lipski's very folksy birdhouses pieced together from recycled wood, plus glass pretending to be icy-clear mushrooms on a real log (by Kat Ely) or horseshoe crabs (by Evan Voelbel).
Elizabeth Alexander (who teaches at Montserrat, where I teach) and Todd Bowser install some poetic weirdness — a model boat sitting atop scaffolding on a step ladder, an animal skull under glass, and a dead bird, exquisitely cut out from paper, hanging from a hook. Their thoughtful handcraft is what attracts you.
There's also humor. The !ND!V!DUALS collective assembles wood scraps into a cartoony elephant in a wheelchair viewing framed marker doodles of itself partying on a beach, walking on the moon, and rolling itself off a cliff.
Basically, the good stuff here is good because of the promise that these folks will (hopefully) impress with bigger, better, funnier somethings in the near-ish future.
"Elsewhere" | Distillery Gallery | 516 East Second St, Boston | Through October 26
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