Home is . . .

New exhibits redefine our living spaces

by Christopher Millis

At the end of the movie The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy sits up in bed and says with a rattling earnestness, "There's no place like home." It has taken me almost 40 years to apply Charles Simic's observation that it's the ambition of every honest cliché to make its way into a great poem to that final scene. I had always understood Judy Garland's twice-spoken dictum to mean there's no place better, but of course that's not what she said. As it turns out, there's also no place like Mount Everest or an electric chair. Meaning that what appears absolute becomes with scrutiny far more slippery than anyone wants. Who notices the dark music, the expression on the girl's face, the shape of the sky in the window behind her? Who wants not to believe in home?

Well, artists, apparently. If any single theme unites the remarkable, unsettling, and varied work to be seen around Boston in the first quarter of the new year, it is the concept of home.

Perhaps the most quietly confrontational of the painters dealing with domesticity as well as other aspects of residential angst is Stephen Coyle, whose recent works go on display at the Chase Gallery from February 5 through March 3. His "D and 7th Street" treats a humble edifice in Coyle's native South Boston. The stark white side of a small windowless building suggests Edward Hopper without Hopper's alien-abduction eeriness; its power lies instead in its haunting sincerity.

Beginning on March 5 (through March 31), the Chase showcases new works by Marilyn Rusekas and Peter Plamondon. Rusekas gets past her front door to do pastel landscapes that look both feathery and hallucinogenic. Plamondon appears to move exclusively between his kitchen and his tool shed. He paints stacks of white dishes and bowls, or terra cotta pots, which he makes arresting and important by delivering to them the energy of a committed agoraphobic.

Among the portrait photographers in the forthcoming group show at the Howard Yezerski Gallery (January 4 to February 1), the notion of the family album takes on a new and menacing look. John O'Reilly, for one, creates photo collages which he sets in small frames last seen on a grandmother's mantel. He superimposes images of his own face and body parts onto famous snapshots and other works of art which are then crowded into misshapen rooms of disarming complexity. You can't help looking. In the same show, John Coplans manages to photograph a body, one fears his own, with frightening directness and originality.

An actual home of sorts is re-created in the Museum of Fine Art's show of 16th- and 17th-century Chinese furniture, on display until May. Home furnishings of the Ming Dynasty have been assembled in an exquisite, second-floor apartment. The very grace and harmony of the dwelling is a reminder of how removed we are from any permanent sense of place. Also, the MFA's "This Is the Modern World," on display until June, shows mostly European, with some US and Japanese, designs of home fixtures which one is grateful not to live with though amused to behold, like the copper mesh arm chair named after a Duke Ellington number or the Milanese teapots sure to scald a guest.

Coming to the MFA is a show of the woodcuts and engravings of Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries (February 15 through September 7). Drawing on one of the strongest Dürer collections in this country, curator Anne Havinga has sensitively organized the exhibit thematically. The recurrent motifs range from the ideal dominatrix to the grisly martyrdom of saints.

At the DeCordova Museum, there's the only Northeast show of the works of 53 self-taught North American artists. It rightly claims to be one of the most comprehensive exhibits of outsider art ever. "Pictured in My Mind," which runs from February 8 through May 26, includes Jack Savitsky's colorful, quilt-like, meditative paintings; Jimmy Lee Sudduth's re-invention of expressionism; and Bessie Harvey's shocking, asymmetrical masks. The earthy treasures of this unusual show are worth a trip to Lincoln.

The Boston Center for the Arts's Mills Gallery currently hosts four miniature, beehive-shaped houses, one each dedicated to earth, air, wind and fire. The collaborative effort of artists Michael Dowling and Laura Baring-Gould, the structures are made of brick and feel alternately like small temples or large ovens; you enter "The Four Windows" (through January 26 ) for spiritual transformation. The BCA goes one better in its next exhibit, "Arranged Marriages, Family Rooms, and Laundry Detergent" (February 21 through April 13). Eighteen artists, paired, will redo the interior of the BCA as a home with each pair responsible for creating a different room, including bath and garage.

Whoever gets the den should check out the Art Institute of Boston's exhibit of traditional and nontraditional folk-art carpets (December 19 through February 3) by Ersari Turkmen, Nepali, and Tibetan weavers. And for an alternative form of security, some of the Janiform statues at the Hamill Gallery of African Art (through January 31) originally functioned to protect entire communities. There is a snarling, double-headed dog with nails for fur by the Bakongo people of Zaire that Toto wouldn't go near.