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Beach bunnies and photo ops
Rebecca Doughty in P-town, Four Decades of Collecting Photography at the Fogg
BY RANDI HOPKINS
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Artist Rebecca Doughty makes scratchy, black-and-white or faintly flesh-toned, little paintings in which darkly etched lines bring a bizarre cast of characters to life. In her most recent work, humanoid rabbits and pigs peer pensively into dark voids, swim, wait for lunch, or stare straight at us, sometimes joined by pig friends, bunny children, or a stuffed animal, scooter, or toy. The critters would be cute if you could be sure they weren’t about to drown, get run over, drop a beloved belonging into a deep hole, or lose themselves to the depression that can come from staring into the beyond. A new exhibition of Doughty’s work called "Scapes" opens at the William-Scott Gallery in Provincetown on August 5, where Doughty’s grasp of emotional and physical precipices fits right in with that beach-town feeling of finding yourself at the edge of the world. A group show, "Sight-Specific," opens at DNA Gallery in Provincetown on August 5. Celebrating DNA Gallery’s "12th season of art on the edge," it presents work by artists Gregory Amenoff, Hiroyuki Hamada, Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, Sharon Horvath, Peter Hutchinson, Steve Morell, Peik Larsen, Dawn Southworth, Francie Randolph, Russell Roberts, and the collaborative duo Sterck & Rozo. At Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum beginning August 6, "A New Kind of Historical Evidence: Photographs from the Carpenter Center Collection" will feature 70 photos and related items from this 28,000-object collection. Harvard has been collecting photographs since the earliest days of the medium, but it wasn’t until the mid 1960s that photographic history became a discipline at the university and the Carpenter Center Photograph Collection was established. Works selected from the Fine Art Photographers Collection, including Edward Weston’s Nude (1936) and O. Winston Link’s Living Room on the Tracks, Lithia, Virginia (1955), explore æsthetic approaches and interpretive uses of photography through history. Images from the Social Museum Collection, including Lewis Hine’s early-20th-century image of children in a vacant lot, taken as part of a study of labor practices and living conditions in Pittsburgh’s immigrant communities, show the camera’s role in social reform. Prints from the American Professional Photographers Collection, including the Barger Studio’s Untitled (Betty’s first bike, Chamberlain, South Dakota (1948), find the sublime in the commercial, and images from the Boston Transit Collection, including Paul Rowell’s 1911 image of the partly completed Harvard Square subway station, bring a slice of Boston’s history to light. "Scapes: New Paintings by Rebecca Doughty" @ William-Scott Gallery, 439 Commercial St, Provincetown | Aug 5-17, opening reception Aug 5, 7-9 pm | 508.487.4040 or www.williamscottgallery.com | "Sight-Specific" @ DNA Gallery, 288 Bradford St, Provincetown, Aug 5–Sept 5, opening reception Aug 5, 6-9 pm | 508.487.7700 or www.dnagallery.com | "A New Kind of Historical Evidence: Photographs from the Carpenter Center Collection" @ Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, 32 Quincy St, Cambridge | Aug 6–Oct 30 | 617.495.9400 or www.artmuseums.harvard.edu
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