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Deep feelings and subversive gestures
Art gets emotional, hits the streets, and gets cyber-active
BY RANDI HOPKINS
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Many of us feel torn between the slick and modern and the reassuringly humble. We love both high tech and home-cooked, digital and spiritual, do-it-yourself and have-your-robot-do-it-for-you — and artists are no different. This spring, we’ll see exhibitions that glorify good old-fashioned subjectivity and the lovingly hand-crafted happily coexisting with a great wave of shows here to strut their cyber-stuff. Our tumultuous inner life is the focus of "Getting Emotional" at the Institute of Contemporary Art (955 Boylston Street in Boston; May 18 through September 5), in which work by 33 artists including Sam Taylor-Wood, Chloe Piene, and Catherine Opie attempts to depict complex human emotion without falling into the scary abyss of sentimentality. A kind of unglued nostalgia for 1970s Process Art inspires "Over + Over: Passion for Process" at the Addison Gallery of American Art (180 Main Street at Phillips Academy in Andover; April 30 through July 31), in which obsessive practitioners of extreme craft including Tom Friedman, Liza Lou, and Jennifer Maestre show how everyday items and traditional craft methods in the hands of artists with a compulsion for time and labor-intensive processes can speak volumes about the human psyche. Also reflecting a high level of personal compulsion, "Deep Clean" at the Essex Art Center (56 Island Street in Lawrence; April 8 through June 9) features a multimedia installation by Sophia Ainslie that includes a one-ton bale of recycled laundry detergent bottles. Always a welcome sign of spring is "The DeCordova Annual Exhibition" at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (51 Sandy Pond Road in Lincoln; April 30 through July 31), which this year presents 10 artists from four New England states. Not content to stay put, art will also be seen taking to the streets — look for the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, a guerrilla initiative that finds "corporate commands" in public spaces (such as an ad for Nike’s "Just do it") and performs them on site. "Corporate Commands," an exhibition at Space 200 (200 State Street in Boston; April 22 through May 29), documents this process while creating a research lab to explore what happens when we do what corporations tell us to do. "Bruce Bemis: Reciprocal Illumination" comes to the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts (539 Tremont Street in Boston; April 8 through June 5). Bemis is known for creating sophisticated film experiences with a distinctly retro feel using whirring projectors and looping film, and his installation is part of the citywide biennial Boston Cyberarts Festival (April 22 through May 8), which is now in its fourth incarnation. Other planned cyber-events and exhibitions include "Shadow Play: Scott Snibbe" at Art Interactive (130 Bishop Allen Drive in Cambridge; April 23 through July 3), in which viewers interact with their shadows, and "Land/Mark: Locative Media and Photography" at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University (832 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston; April 8 through May 5), which examines how we "map" the terrain we occupy using the zippy tools of global positioning and new media to give scientific credibility to what is often a highly subjective endeavor. Another modern take on where, exactly, we find ourselves is "Air Lines: Photographs by Alex MacLean" at the Peabody Essex Museum (East India Square in Salem; May 14 through January 22), which features aerial photography by an eagle-eyed pilot. Reality and the nature of originality are at issue in "Sturtevant, the Brutal Truth" at MIT’s List Visual Art Center (32 Ames Street in Cambridge; May 11 through July 10). Sturtevant has been replicating artworks made by her male colleagues for decades now, from Andy Warhol to Paul McCarthy. As the artist seems to have foreseen, the question of what is "handmade" or "original" just gets more and more slippery. "Xavier Veilhan: The Hyperrealist Project" and "Double Take: Photorealism from the ’60s and ’70s" at the Rose Art Museum (415 South Street at Brandeis University in Waltham; May 19 through July 31) both take on photorealism, a style of painting whose reputation has, I’m happy to see, been resurrected lately. And painting that explores painting — the mark made by brush on canvas, to be precise — is on view in "Jodie Manasevit: Just Paintings" at the Worcester Art Museum (55 Salisbury Street in Worcester; May 13 through August 21).
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