In his groundbreaking, reputation-making sculpture and video work of the early 2000s, Paul Pfeiffer has taken iconic film footage — Hitchcock’s shower scene in Psycho, or the 1964 heavyweight championship bout between then Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston — and used various methods to erase the key figures, leaving us to grapple with their ghosts, their stage sets, and their audiences. Exhibiting an uncanny knack for choosing fraught images, Pfeiffer has used our own best-loved scenes, whether from sports, Hollywood, or pop culture, as springboards for examining deeply embedded issues of race and identity.
Opening next Thursday, February 6, at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center is " Paul Pfeiffer, " an exhibition of new video, photography, and sculpture. Speaking over the phone from his New York studio, Pfeiffer explains that the most significant piece in the show, for him, might be Morning After the Deluge, a piece that not only represents a big jump in scale (it’s shown on a screen that’s about 12 by 16 feet) but is also his first experience working with footage he’s taken himself. So what unusual and exciting subject matter did the artist shoot? " Sunrises and sunsets in Provincetown. " Yet in his hands, a subject that is perhaps the definition of artistic cliché promises to take on a whole new and engrossing dimension. Pfeiffer will be at the exhibition’s opening reception next Friday, February 7, and he’ll be giving a free talk at the List on February 8 at 1 p.m.
VH1 MAY HAVE Behind the Music, but for contemporary art, there’s nothing like going to hear an artist talk to get the lowdown on challenging work. This month, conceptual artist Nayland Blake and photographer Thomas Struth are both coming to Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Blake’s art includes videotapes of his own (fairly large) self dancing in a bunny costume, but serious issues of race and sexual identity are never far below the surface. He’ll be speaking on February 10 at 5 p.m. Struth is best known for big pictures of people visiting famous art museums that are made to hang in famous art museums (The MFA owns a particularly beautiful one). He’ll be speaking on February 13 at 6 p.m.
Pairing artists for a two-person exhibition is a tricky business, but James Hull, proprietor of the Gallery @ Green Street, does it with finesse and élan in " Isabel Riley and Laurel Sparks, " an exhibition juxtaposing Riley’s wildly colored mixed-media sculpture with Sparks’s sprawling, fresco-like paintings. Take the Orange Line to Green Street in JP to check out the lively interplay between the work of these two.
February is Black History Month, and though 28 days are far too few for the many worthy programs the topic suggests, the MFA gives it a shot starting this Saturday, February 1, with a demonstration by textile artist Theresa India Young, who will show how she makes work inspired by the history, culture, and artistic achievements of Africa. Next Thursday, February 6, the MFA’s month-long African Film Festival gets under way with Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness. And on February 23, African kora musician Mamadou Diabate performs.
" Paul Pfeiffer " is at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street in Cambridge, from February 6 through April 6. The artist gives a free public talk at the List on February 8 at 1 p.m.; call (617) 452-3586. Nayland Blake speaks at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, on February 10 at 5 p.m., and Thomas Struth speaks there on February 13 at 6 p.m.; call (617) 495-3251. " Isabel Riley and Laurel Sparks " is at the Gallery @ Green Street, in the Orange Line’s Green Street MBTA Station in Jamaica Plain, from February 7 through March 15; call (617) 522-0000. Theresa India Young will demonstrate her work in the Riley Seminar Room at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, this Saturday, February 1, from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. For information on this and other MFA programs, call (617) 267-9300.
