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[Art reviews]

Street fare
Summer is suddenly in season on Newbury

BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS


“Uneasy: Photographic Portraits”
At the Howard Yezerski Gallery, 14 Newbury Street, through August 18.
“Harriet Casdin-Silver: Three from ‘A Celebration of Aging’ ”
At Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury Street, through July 20.
“In the Spirit of Landscape VI”
At the Nielsen Gallery, 179 Newbury Street, through August 4.
“Established New Talent”
At the Chappell Gallery, 14 Newbury Street, through September 6.

The Boston art scene between Memorial Day and Labor Day tends to look as fatigued as out-of-season produce. Your typical July or August Newbury Street show has, for the last few years, delivered the desiccated, pulpy taste of a late-summer orange or winter apricot. This year, however, with two outstanding exhibits and two others that ought to be outstanding, Newbury is looking more like a succession of fresh-fruit-and-vegetable stands.

Nowhere is the bounty richer than in a captivating and frequently unsettling show of mostly black-and-white photography at the Howard Yezerski Gallery, “Uneasy Photographic Portraits.” Curated with a discerning eye and renegade spirit by Timothy Welsh, “Uneasy” presents an amalgam of portraits by name-brand and soon-to-be name-brand American photographers.

One of the beauties of this show is the effortless way it transcends all tricks. No fancy emulsion techniques, no transfer of images to the sides of buildings, no sealing off of windows to remake a room or a vehicle into a pinhole camera. It harks back to old-fashioned photographic portraiture: all the interest, all the shock and the lyricism and the poignancy, has been achieved through relatively straightforward technique. Instead of pyrotechnics, the artists rely on each frame’s exquisitely articulated composition, on the importance and subtlety of their content, and occasionally on the dynamics of color.

The signature piece here is Ken Probst’s 1989 Tattooed Twins, a work of uncanny complexity, ambiguity, and, yes, directness. The eponymous shirtless, square-jawed, handsome figures are lying prone beside each other on a sheetless mattress. Positioned shoulder to shoulder with almost identically crossed arms, they stare — dreamily? seductively? confrontationally? blankly? — into Probst’s camera, part carnival act, part porn team, part hip jokesters. The pattern of the mattress cover on which they stretch mimics the pattern of their tattoo’d arms and shoulders, with the result that the boys seem made of the bed and the bed seems made of them. A dissertation could be written about the mystery of this image’s transgressions, its creepy yet familiar sexuality, its remoteness as a narrative combined with its visual immediacy, its utter casualness and high formality. At every moment the twins’ composure is challenged by the surrounding weirdness. And by bringing together optical cadences and rhymes — cut the image down the middle to appreciate Probst’s delicate symmetries and asymmetries — in a context that’s both inexplicable and sexually charged, the artist creates an enigmatic drama.

Tattooed Twins can’t help upstaging whatever it’s near. Yet a great deal in the show does stand up to it. Skip the big-name contributions of Andy Warhol and Chuck Close (neither of whom inspires with his precious celeb shots) and go to Andrea Modica’s black-and-white photos of baseball players, three drawn from her “Minor League” series and one of Darryl Strawberry. Modica explores a particular brand of despair: momentary episodes of vulnerability as they assault the otherwise healthy, handsome, athletic, and young. All her ballplayers look fatigued, some look exhausted, and often their eyes glow plaintively, as if they’d just landed on the shores of resignation. One athlete’s eye is bruised and swollen; another’s nose bleeds; and the way the sweat glistens on Strawberry’s face, it’s as though somebody had just smashed a bottle against his head.

As with Probst’s Twins, the sculpted attractiveness of Modica’s baseball players lures you into intimations of pain and suffering. Other artists in “Uneasy” work more overtly, like Gary Schneider in his 1994 black-and-white Peyton, an oversized, distorted close-up of a woman’s face. She’s being either pressed from behind into a pane of glass or caught in some sort of vacuum or wind tunnel; whatever’s going on, her visage looks as if it were being drawn and quartered, an emblem of agony.

Chris Verene’s portraits, where clarity and color take in full-fledged social settings (restaurants, neighborhoods, homes), appear the opposite of Schneider’s. But Schneider’s allusion to physical suffering finds its complement in Verene’s allusion to despair. The distracted and vaguely crazed face of the thin middle-aged man beside a defiantly wide-eyed, almost tearful little girl comes at you from the other side of a cluttered food counter. Although proximate, father and daughter seem worlds apart, and the handwritten caption beneath their portrait suggests why: “My cousin Steve with one of his daughters. . . . His wife has just left them for the battered-women’s shelter.” In Verene’s disturbing images, decorum plays off intimations of violence, calm public façade off riotous private truth.

Other important contributions to this remarkable exhibit (18 artists, more than 30 works) include two tender Polaroid collages by John O’Reilly, a pair of arresting gelatin silver prints in the spirit of Walker Evans by Shelby Lee Adams, and demanding (and rewarding) photographs by William Geddney, Disfarmer, and Sa Schloff.

A FEW BLOCKS DOWN from the Yezerski, a very different photography exhibit occupies Gallery NAGA: three large holographic portraits by Boston’s own mother of holography, Harriet Casdin-Silver, have been joined by the astutely engineered “audio domes” of Kevin Brown. In these works from Casdin-Silver’s “Celebration of Aging” series (her subjects, including a self-portrait, are all over 75), we not only see but hear from her images: each portrait is accompanied by an audio installation in the voice of the artist’s model.

There is, unfortunately, a limitation on this intelligent and in many respects groundbreaking show: the audio domes force you to stand at a particular distance from Casdin-Silver’s poignant images, and that means you can’t appreciate the holograms’ unique properties (since they appear three-dimensional only when you move around them). And the narrations themselves would be more exciting if they weren’t regarded as mere extensions of the visual imagery, reproductions in sound of what your eyes take in. Were the three audio tapes not all monologues, for instance, or were they not all exclusively in the voices of their subjects, a greater inventiveness and sense of play might obtain.

TWO GROUP SHOWS, one treating landscapes, the other glass, triumph despite poor presentation. At the Nielsen Gallery, a crowded invitational of 18 artists turns out to be like a Fabergé egg, overdone but studded with real gems. Block out whatever’s to the immediate left and right of Sungjoon Joh’s Mysterious Sea for a lyrical, meditative, fresh treatment of a commonplace subject. And Dexter Lazenby’s two sculptures — one on too small a wall, the other positioned against the backdrop of a giant painting — prove both ethereal and tough. His works read like ghosts of what’s been discarded from a woodworking shop.

At the Chappell Gallery, where display invariably seems an afterthought, an exciting combination of established as well as aspiring glass artists will encourage you to look past the disarray. Three extraordinary pieces by the acclaimed Mary Shaffer combine what looks like molten glass with various metal objects. And Trinh Nguyen’s abstract, kinetic creations seem both architectural and alive — cylindrical and transparent, they suggest vascular sea creatures, both sculpted and sinewy.

Issue Date: July 12-19, 2001