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Tools of the trade
Art and utility at the DeCordova
BY RANDI HOPKINS

Do the aisles of Home Depot fill you with desire? From the curve of a well-designed pair of pliers to the heft of the perfect snow shovel, we become intimate with the utilitarian objects that make our lives easier. And just as the nude and the Campbell’s soup can have been immortalized in art, so too has the humble tool. "Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection," opening at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park on March 8, recognizes our fixation with our hardware stores as it puts on view an amazing variety of contemporary art depicting or incorporating tools and hardware, among it Claes Oldenburg’s meditations on the three-prong plug and Arman’s bevy of real paint brushes on canvas, all of them looking as lively as Mickey’s broom in the Fantasia sequence of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The art in "Tools As Art" comes to the DeCordova from the Hechinger Collection, which was initiated by John Hechinger Sr., chairman of the board of the Hechinger Company, a former chain of hardware and building-material stores in the DC area. As the Hechinger Collection Web site tells it, in 1978 Hechinger moved the company, which had been started by his father in 1911, to Landover, Maryland; yet he found the new corporate headquarters sterile. He has said of that time: "It struck me that the endless repetition of corridors and cubicles was boring and seemed to rebuke the fantasies that a hardware store inspires. For anyone whose passion is work with his or her hands, a good hardware store is a spur to the imagination." Thus he began to acquire art that honored the objects from which he derived his livelihood, much to the enjoyment of first his employees and now us.

The DeCordova has long led the way in showing photography in the Boston area; as early as the 1950s, it mounted impressive shows of work in a medium that was still being sniffed at suspiciously by fine-art connoisseurs. Thus it’s fitting that also opening at the DeCordova on March 8 is "Street Portraits, 1946-1976: The Photographs of Jules Aarons," which features this Boston photographer’s documentation of street life here and around the world. Aarons’s photographs extend the tradition of such artists as Henri Cartier-Bresson, recording in black and white the world he inhabits, from revealing images of Boston neighborhoods in the late 1940s to the joie de vivre of a street performer in Paris. Aarons first exhibited at the DeCordova in 1951; now, 52 years later, this retrospective shows the enduring freshness of his vision.

An almost photographic reality attends the exquisite abstractions of painter Chris Teasley, whose first solo show opens on March 7 at Clifford•Smith Gallery in Boston’s South End. Although the artist’s own description of his finely realized paintings as "hyper realist abstractions" may sound like an oxymoron, Teasley’s clever reworking of the trompe l’oeil tradition by way of digital imagery results in some spellbinding objects.

Painting is also breathtaking at Gallery NAGA this month, where two more shows open on March 7. David Moore’s rich paintings use a deceptively simple vocabulary of abstract line and color to conjure vast universes of meaning. Stuart Ober’s intensely realistic renderings of the most mundane details of modern life, often with a tongue-in-cheek bite to them. It would seem that the two couldn’t be more different — so why do I suspect that they resonate in a delightful way? See for yourself; Gallery NAGA even invites you to have dinner "out" with David Moore after his gallery talk on March 11 (Dutch treat).

"Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection" and "Street Portraits, 1946-1976: The Photographs of Jules Aarons" are at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Road in Lincoln, March 8 through May 25. Call (781) 259-8355. "Chris Teasley" is at the Clifford Smith Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, #300, March 7 through 29. Call (617) 695-0255. "David Moore: Vibe" and "Stuart Ober: Paintings" are at Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury Street, March 7 through 29. Call (617) 267-9060.

Issue Date: March 6 - 13, 2003

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