Is there any way to opt out of our troubling style of capitalism? (The term “capitalism,” I’d like to note, makes nary an appearance in the three exhibits.) The closest we get to an alternative is Yuken Teruya’s ingenious cut-paper dioramas. He collects paper shopping bags (here mostly from high-end boutiques), slices out pieces from one side, and assembles those into exquisite little paper trees standing inside the bags, with dramatic light and shadows filtering through the holes he cut in the bag. They’re philosophical poems about trees turned into paper that then becomes refuse that he fashions into tiny trees. They’re about recycling corporate industrial junk into something exquisite, small, one-of-a-kind, human, handmade. And they’re gorgeous feats of craftsmanship.
Tufts is also presenting a small exhibit of sculptures and videos by Chilean-born New Yorker Iván Navarro that was organized by Tufts University Gallery director Amy Ingrid Schlegel. Navarro has been aping the looks of classic minimalist sculpture in pieces of social criticism. Die Again (Monument for Tony Smith) (2006) re-creates Smith’s landmark six-foot-square steel cube as a looming black walk-in 12-foot-square plywood haunted house of magic mirrors, a Beatles cover (“Nowhere Man,” with female vocals and percussion), and ominous darkness. It’s supposed to be a reflection on the “Desaparecidos” — the “Disappeared” — of Chilean despot Augusto Pinochet’s rule from 1973 to 1990 and the expatriate experience, but it’s hard to tell.
Flashlight: I’m not from here, I’m not from there (2006) is a large black wheelbarrow covered with lit blue fluorescent bulbs (à la Dan Flavin); Homeless Lamp: The Juice Sucker (2005) is a bulky white shopping cart covered with lit white fluorescent bulbs. On their own they’re magnetic (the bright lights attract your eyes but prevent you from seeing them clearly) but inert. They come alive in videos in which men wander city streets or deserted railroad tracks and break into street lamps to steal electricity or siphon gas from a car to fuel a generator to power the sculptures’ lights. They become melancholy meditations on homelessness and poverty, on power and powerlessness.
“Some Sort of Uncertainty,” now at Axiom Gallery in collaboration with Art Interactive, makes the gallery appear empty, but that’s a tease. Eight artists brought together by guest curator Adriana Ross have hidden stuff all over the place, and they’ve provided a map and a list to create a scavenger hunt.
Liz Nofziger of Jamaica Plain hides teeny plastic figurines around the gallery. Malden’s Doug Weathersby sweeps a bunch of gallery dirt onto a shelf. Brookline’s Nathalie Miebach sticks little labels along the bottom of the walls that list places, dates, and cryptic symbols that I imagine relate to her title, Recent Meteorological Anomalies. Jamaica Plain artist Lina Maria Giraldo’s Anti-personnel (2008) startles visitors with the sounds of explosions triggered by a motion sensor hidden in the ceiling. But all this stuff feels underdeveloped.
Still, it’s worth the trip to see what Cantabrigian Brian Knep is up to. Peek around a corner into a little inaccessible room and you’ll see a dim circle of light projected on the wall opposite. Flip a nearby switch and an oval of brighter light shines on the wall. Cell-like things (actually a child’s drawings of balloon-head people with stick limbs) swarm to the top of the oval, leaving a gap where the dim circle of light had been. Now and again, one of the cell people enters the circle, inflates, and sinks to the bottom. Then the bright light goes out and the critters drift down, until you switch the light back on and the cycle begins again. Knep’s interactive video installation is a digital cross between watching sea monkeys and playing those ’80s Tomy water pinball games.
