O’Reilly’s Playmates takes on the subject of war in a way that is heartbreaking in its nonchalance. A handsome WWI soldier in German uniform who looks no older than 18 appears worn down in his youthfulness, weary and fatigued. Below him is another candid picture of another kid, a family snapshot of a 10-year-old boy, dressed as if for Sunday mass, circa 1960. The younger boy is energetically impatient; smirking, hands on his hips, he’s just about had it with the suit and the picture-taking. He wants to run off and play. The two pictures are joined and supported by a small pedestal, near which a toy truck butts against a wall. Past and present merge in the space containing that truck — the implied baby who played with toys, the mischief-making suburban kid, the beardless soldier. Near to one another in age, the three are separated by the gulf of suffering, the world we inherit, from which the teenager may not have returned.
It’s not hard to detect the kinkiness of Ruth Daniels’s elegant abstractions. Gentle, floral swirls in muted colors appear below hazy square sheets of vellum — they could be the outlines of roses reworked in Photoshop. But punctuating the sheets of vellum that blanket Daniels’s hidden gardens are little holes out of which tiny protuberances emerge like skin tags, or the tips of paper removed from plastic drinking straws and rolled into mosquito-sized darts. Mostly the darts are white, but sometimes they’re brightly colored. What is consistent is the disruption they create in the picture plane, a pointed counterpoint to the lovely, watery sea from which they poke out. You can’t help but try to reconcile the differences.
Does it help to know that the forms that look like flowers are actually plastic bags or that the colors that brighten some of the artist’s works derive from pigmented shellac? Is it important to know that those miniature rises are actually bits of the underlying plastic bag that Daniels has pinched forward? Possibly. But even without that knowledge the works succeed as muted provocations.
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From butoh to Swan Lake and back
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Wurm and Walker at the Rose, American photography at the Addison, Malpede and Fletcher at MIT
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American watercolors, toothpicks and roadtrips, and ‘Mixing Speak’ at the New Art Center
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“Living in Motion: Design and Architecture for Flexible Dwelling” at the ICA
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African-Americans in Andover, nudes in Winchester, sunglasses and cellphones in Essex
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Topics:
Museum And Gallery
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