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Location, location, location
Photography and geography at the PRC, words and pictures at GASP, and deep cleaning in Essex
BY RANDI HOPKINS
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I love the essay introducing "Land/Mark: Locative Media and Photography," an ambitious new show opening at the Photographic Resource Center on April 8 in conjunction with the citywide Boston Cyberarts Festival (April 22 through May 8). PRC curator Leslie Brown bluntly confesses, "Anyone who knows me realizes that I am terrible at directions. I have also been known, via some sort of weird magnetic ability, to destroy computers and other technological devices." Fitting as I do into these same categories, I applaud Brown’s foray into the world of artists who combine photography with state-of-the-art technologies developed to help us identify physical places on our planet: GPS (Global Positioning System), SMS (Short Messaging Service), and GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications). The results elucidate the basic human urge to figure out where we are, and where we could go, an urge that reaches back to the earliest explorers and navigation systems as well as forward to the potential for Webcams on the moon. Brown has restricted "Land/Mark" to the work of three artists and one "global public art project." Margot Kelley photographs public places where strangers have stashed "geocaches," little treasure troves hidden as part of a GPS-enabled game in which the hiders post the latitude and longitude of a particular location on a Web site and invite people to find the actual spot in the real world. (These sites have included an underpass to a Boston T-stop.) Brooke Knight travels to places where lines of latitude and longitude cross and takes a rubbing of the ground and a photograph of the sky at each site. Josh Winer visits places where earth is being used as raw material or a by-product, such as a Quincy quarry filled in with excess dirt from the Big Dig, and makes photographs associating these places with their GPS coordinates. And participants in the project Yellow Arrow place coded yellow arrows at different locations — an unusual fire hydrant, say, or a favorite pub — and then send text messages from mobile phones to "save a thought" on that particular spot. Folks who come across these arrows can access the message by sending its code to a designated phone number; the marked places are thus turned into shared experiences across time and between strangers. The interplay between visual and verbal expression takes a very different form in "IMAGE/TEXT," which, curated by artists Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, opens at GASP (Gallery Artists Studio Project) on April 8. Nine visual artists (including painters as varied as Gail Boyajian and and Kerry James Marshall) and 10 poets (including Charles Coe and Phoenix contributor Christopher Millis) will look at how words make their way into pictures, and how pictures pop up through words, a synergy that has benefitted both areas of creativity at least since the beginning of illuminated manuscripts. It is the words "Tide" and "Clorox" that resonate for artist Sophia Ainslie, whose "Deep Clean," opening at the Essex Art Center on April 8, features a one-ton bale of recycled laundry detergent bottles. These plastic icons are a charged metaphor for American consumers — they might even shame some of us into taking a stab at spring cleaning. Also at the Essex, "Familiar Faces: Serigraphs by Benjamin Gross" presents bold and colorful images inspired by people. "Land/Mark: Locative Media and Photography" is at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, 832 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, April 8 through May 5; call (617) 975-0600. "IMAGE/TEXT" is at GASP, 362 Boylston Street in Brookline, April 8 through May 15; call (617) 731-2500. "Familiar Faces: Serigraphs by Benjamin Gross" and "Deep Clean: Sophia Ainslie" are at the Essex Art Center, 56 Island Street in Lawrence, April 8 through May 6 and April 8 through June 9, respectively; call (978) 685-2343.
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