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‘Cut’ at the Mills; ‘High Style and Hoop Skirts’ at the MFA
BY RANDI HOPKINS
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In the wrong hands, knives, jigsaws, and X-actos could be lethal weapons, but Chris Nau, Randal Thurston, and Debra Weisberg use these pointy tools to transform otherwise innocuous materials like walls, paper, and styrofoam into beautiful and thought-provoking works of art in "Cut," which opens at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery on November 12. Curated by Mills Gallery director Laura Donaldson, the show looks at both the 2-D and the 3-D implications of a "cut" — an invasive gesture that can work in a linear way to define an edge, draw a line, or incise a gash or else alter an object’s shape in space by carving, chopping, or otherwise snipping away at it. For "Cut," Nau, Thurston, and Weisberg create site-specific installations, each using the Mills’s own funky space as a blank canvas and incorporating it into their art. Chris Nau sees a gallery wall not as simply a location for art but as the very material of his art. Working with graphite and a jigsaw, he "draws" both on and into the wall, marking and cutting into his picture plane, building onto it, and then using white paint and his saw to erase, to make negative space, and generally to thwart and blur clear boundaries between sculpture and drawing. Randal Thurston works his magic with cut-paper silhouettes whose dramatic form, lyrical attachment to the walls (they float, they twist, they hover . . . ), and poetic relationship to the space he works in takes the "flat" out of two-dimensionality. Debra Weisberg is known for her inventive use of unusual materials (from gut to concrete to plaster and glass, in recent memory) in work that often alludes to a sense of the living/breathing in the inanimate. For this exhibition, she’s creating a multi-part floor installation using cut styrofoam. Word has it that her work will push up against Mills Gallery walls like a tide, playing with the physical place where floor meets wall, a particularly fraught location when it comes to making distinctions between drawing and sculptural work. It was the glimpse of an ankle that wowed style-savvy folks in the 1850s, when a swinging new fashion innovation — the steel-hoop skirt — came along, replacing heavy layers of petticoats with a strong, lightweight device that swayed with a woman’s walk, emphasizing her curvy silhouette and revealing her previously unseen legs. Opening on November 6, the Museum of Fine Arts, "High Style and Hoop Skirts: 1850s Fashion" brings this charming decade to life through its fanciful frippery. Drawn from the MFA’s collection and curated by Lauren Whitley, "High Style" features 10 complete ensembles for women and men, along with gloves and hats, fans and parasols, and, of course, the decorative stockings and shoes that became a new fashion focal point as skirts went flouncing around and technical innovation in textile dyes and mechanized production of lace, woven silks, and printed fabrics provided new inspiration for haute couture. "Cut" is at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery, 539 Tremont Street in the South End, November 12 though January 9, with a free opening reception on November 12 from 6 to 8 p.m. and a free gallery talk on November 19 from 6:30 to 8 p.m.; call (617) 426-8835, or visit www.bcaonline.org. "High Style and Hoop Skirts: 1850s Fashion" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue in Boston, November 6 through March 13; call (617) 267-9300 or visit www.mfa.org
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