In “In Lieu of Modernity,” at Space Other, Alexander Apostol of Madrid examines the failed utopian promise of modern architecture in his native Caracas, Venezuela. The main event is 13 six-foot-tall photos of buildings from his Residente Pulido (2001, 2003) series: they line the gallery’s main hall as if it were a city street. On one side, Apostol digitally removed doors and windows from modernist Caracas buildings. The other side features apartment buildings with windows and doors physically blocked up because of crime. It’s a sad, uncanny brew of images and ideas. The city looks closed up, turned in on itself, the buildings becoming unsettling sculpture, eerie monuments, mausoleums. The exhibition is filled out by photos of the towering steel frames of unfinished and abandoned modernist highrises in Caracas and some videos. The point: modernist dreams have screwed the little people. But the results are by turns obscure and didactic.
Laura Donaldson, the Boston Center for the Arts’ recently departed gallery director, imports hot-shot Scottish artist Martin Creed for her goodbye exhibit. Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off re-creates the 2001 exhibit at the Tate Britain in London that won Creed that year’s Turner Prize. It consists of an empty gallery with the lights flicking on and off every five seconds in a leisurely strobing. Creed’s installation brings your attention to the gallery lighting (duh) and architecture (because you want to avoid bumping into it when the lights cut out). It’s mildly amusing, but a forgettable minimalist goof.
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‘Beings’ there, Not a girl who misses much, Alternative universe, More 
- ‘Beings’ there
In the front window of Stairwell Gallery sit Leif Goldberg’s life-sized coyote-man marionette and some of Erin Rosenthal’s Garbage Dancers .
- Not a girl who misses much
Sound is all around: pop music acts as a hair trigger for memory.
- Alternative universe
In the 1930s and '40s, Boston painters developed a moody, mythic realism. They mixed social satire with depictions of street scenes, Biblical scenes, and mystical symbolic narratives, all of it darkened by the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II.
- Year in Art: Beyond the gloom
The Boston art scene felt muted for much of 2008, with 10 galleries closing and the death of two local icons: Harriet Casdin-Silver and Jules Aarons.
- Here comes trouble
There’s nothing like a brouhaha to make art feel relevant. And the Boston art scene has just been blessed by two.
- Time out of mind
Luisa Rabbia created a slow-moving video work that offers a kind of travelogue of her own journey through Isabella Stewart Gardner's historic scrapbooks.
- Toy stories
Tokyo photographer Noaki Honjo turns Japanese metropolises into adorable li’l things.
- Neo-rococo
Jamaica Plain's Laurel Sparks has become one of our best local abstract painters, as her new collection of bright, fun, juicy, abstracted chandeliers at Howard Yezerski Gallery attests.
- Photos: Boston expressionism at Danforth Museum
Photos of the works of expressionist artists David Aronson, Henry Schwartz, Gerry Bergstein and at the Danforth Museum in Framingham.
- Journey to the surface of the Earth
Looking at the landscape brings out the artist in everyone.
- Home on the range
This is one of those revisionist Westerns. Her subjects reflect what her father, Pulitzer-winning journalist John McPhee, has called her “constant search for the dividing lines between altered and unaltered worlds.”
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Museum And Gallery
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