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Surprising monuments
Abelardo Morell moves on; plus Mary Lum, Henry Horenstein, and ‘Spring Formal’
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
"Abelardo Morell: New Photographs" and "Mary Lum: Tracing the City (Part II)"
At Bernard Toale Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, through April 30.
"Henry Horenstein: Humans"
At Clifford•Smith Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, through April 23
"Spring Formal: Jennifer Riley, John Mendelsohn, Donna Avedisian"
At OH + T Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, through April 23.


Change is especially difficult — and perilous — for the mid-career artist. It risks the disillusionment of collectors, the disavowal of gallery directors, and the opprobrium of critics — or, worse, their disregard. Why ditch a good thing? Change is to the artist what the Sirens’ song was to Odysseus: you have to stand there and listen while those around you jump ship. Few are equal to it.

So when I walked into the Bernard Toale Gallery and realized I was looking at a new body of work by Abelardo Morell, I worried. An increasingly recognized figure on the international scene and a central presence in Boston, where he’s a professor of photography as Massachusetts College of Art, Morell is a craftsman of impeccable taste and consistent insight. His meticulous imagery is a product of the conscious control of what enters his frames, objects, light, perspective. What, I wondered, if this latest work is merely sharp and skillful? What if he hasn’t changed?

Not to worry. Morell’s latest photographs are marked by a spirit of playful exploration, a seasoned pleasure in the fleeting magic of the material world, the calculated boldness of a general plotting a major military maneuver. Without sacrificing any feature of his signature style — high-contrast, large-scale, black-and-white images that imbue commonplace architectural elements with lyrical narratives — he’s taken up a fresh set of challenges. For the first time, he appears to be looking around and asking, "How does this work?" "New Photographs" is delightfully new.

Morell’s gift lies in part in his ability to shift perspective so that the quotidian becomes cathedral-like, a lost wonder: museum guards positioned beside portraits from classical paintings, the seat of a playground slide that recaptures a child’s sense of dizzying height, a kid’s-book illustration that appears to have come to life. Although the objects of his attention remain pedestrian, a degree of scientific inquiry has set in. The glass vials belong to a laboratory kit, the hammer is in the act of hitting its nail, the cutlery has been arranged to resemble a daredevil circus act. More important, his new imagery is infused by a sense of movement. His earlier work forbade chance occurrence, in large measure because what he shot didn’t move. Those objects — books, print, furniture — wore their stasis as a kind of badge, daring the photographer to charge them with life. Now you can trace a level of dynamism that isn’t the artist’s alone. In his 2005 Construction with Narrow Mirrors and Laser Pointer, a beam of light zigzags between two facing mirrors; the beam’s intensity is so great, you might think you could roll a marble down it. In Motion Study of Hammer on Lead, what looks at first like a slow-motion succession of three hammer blows turns out to be a succession of three outlines of a hammer on a sheet of lead. As with Motion Study of Falling Pitchers, the placement of objects makes you imagine movement where there is none.

Still and moving intersect in almost every picture in the show: a Braille book illustration of the Leaning Tower of Pisa; the momentarily arrested vortex in the upper half of an hourglass; a spoon balanced precariously on the tip of a steel knife; the unwound guts of a mechanical clock. Even the 2004 Laboratory Glassware Construction, with its interlocking etched beakers and glass spheres that resemble hot air balloons, looks one second shy of percolating and sending off steam. My favorite work here admits to even greater chance. In Light Entering Our House (2004), sunlight pours through a skylight, but the skylight has been manipulated so the sunbeams channel through variously sized round apertures. The cascading pattern of a spectrum of luminous beams re-creates itself on the floor in the foreground, both a rainbow and its pot of gold.

What the slight, colorful, geometric collages of Mary Lum and the photos of Abe Morell share is their sense of imaginary architecture. Whereas Morell creates scaffolding with a laser beam and palpable columns out of sunlight, his imaginary architecture inclines toward heft. He’s a magical realist, you might say. Lum is a magical unrealist. The large wall painting that greets you on entering the gallery is pleasant, but it’s nowhere near as intense and energetic as the diminutive paper confections on the nearby walls. Lum takes the interiors of rooms she finds in French comic books, trims away everything but the thinnest outlines of those cartoony interiors, and winds up with unexpectedly charming constructions. They’re like tiny, overlapping, haphazardly sized networks of picture frames no one of which sports a picture, complicated galleries where nothing hangs on the walls. Like the books from which they derive, they all but disappear at a distance; up close, they want to draw you into spaces alternately ribald and refined.

ABE MORELL, IT TURNS OUT, isn’t the only internationally renowned Boston photographer breaking new ground, and neither is Mary Lum the only abstract artist evoking spatial arrangements with colorful lines. Upstairs from the Toale Gallery, a complementary pair of shows at Clifford•Smith Gallery and OH + T Gallery induce a kind of double take. At the Clifford•Smith, Henry Horenstein has turned his camera away from the backs of hippos, the feet of elephants, and the tongues of panting dogs to take on a new species — humans. His humans, however, are not recognizable as a species and never as an identifiable body. They come in parts: breasts and eyelashes, penises and nipples, buttocks and lips. These muted, arresting, often unsettling large images are as provocative as they are exquisitely composed. What’s the last time you looked at an image that was neither exploitive nor pornographic nor gruesome and still made you pull back as if from an electric shock? Horenstein’s photos are a charge.

Jennifer Riley’s paintings at OH + T look like blown-up or water-saturated versions of Mary Lum’s skinny borders: candy-colored tubing through which rectilinear forms course. If robots had blood, this is what you’d see through a microscope. Also included in OH + T’s well-conceived "Spring Formal" are the blotchy, abstract paintings of Donna Avedisian — they’re a cross between maps and oil spills — and the modulated, wavy, spring-scented confections of John Mendelsohn.


Issue Date: April 15 - 21, 2005
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