ressmaker Regina Frank takes the art of
the seamstress and transforms it into beautiful, conceptual commentary
on the self and society in her show at the Clifford-Smith Gallery. Frank,
a German artist and visiting faculty member at the School of the Museum
of Fine Arts, calls her exhibition ''Mother of Perl,'' a play on the name
of a computer programming language and the beads that oysters make.
The artist uses both in her work, mounted as part of the Cyberarts Festival.
She makes leaps that encompass the tangible and the virtual, and that work
in both space and time. There's one installation here, a variety of small
works, and documentation of previous installations, including ''L'adieu,''
a performance Frank did in a window at the New Museum of Contemporary Art
in New York.
She stitched pearls onto a silk gown over a period of days. Each day,
a neon display above her head broadcast the hourly wage of a woman somewhere
in the world. She started out at $17.10, the wage in Norway, and ended
at 20 cents, the wage in Indonesia. She bought bread and flowers to demonstrate
the purchase power of the wages, and spread them on the floor of the performance
space, along with bowls steeped with pearls. The installation, as shown
here in digital prints, and the resulting evening gown, is beautiful and
humbling.
The installation on view, ''A Dress,'' comprises a white gown with a
flowing skirt mounted on a dressmaker's dummy. The skirt, anchored to the
floor by black boots, houses a computer. During this piece's first installation
in 1995, the artist traveled and e-mailed every day to ''A Dress,'' and
the printouts of the letters hang from the interior of the skirt, each
pinned to a black leaf polka-dotting the outside of the fabric.
Frank's dresses become a metaphor for the self and a costume for society.
They reference oppression, but also tender undercurrents of the soul and
a person's need to thrive and connect.
Michael Mazur may be best known for his paintings and prints, but he
knows that the origins of his work lie in drawing. ''A line is both itself
and the edge of everything else,'' he says in a statement accompanying
a small show of his drawings at the Horn Gallery at Babson College. What
better place to begin?
The show spans the artist's drawings from 1961 to 1997. The earliest,
''Kathe as a Baby,'' is studies in sepia ink of the sleeping infant. The
delicate lines convey the heft and slumber of the baby. To draw something
is to truly see it, and to make a line is to caress. You can see Mazur's
love for the baby.
''Copper Beech'' (1985), a charcoal piece, shows the upper section of
a massive trunk where the branches begin to split and stretch away from
the tree like children. Take a deep breath and fall into this beech's embrace;
it feels at once giant and maternal, majestic and utterly ordinary, and
there's something soothing about that. ''Recurved Lily'' (1982), charcoal
studies of the graceful petals of a lily slowly unfurling, tease and seduce.
Over the years the drawings become deeper, more layered, and more abstract.
Two are from the ''Branching'' series, which Mazur showed at the DeCordova
last year. In them, he creates space with lines that open into shadows
and frenetic fibers that dance along the surface.
Mazur's exhibit is a small one, but it doesn't take much. This artist
shows us how it's done.
The Bromfield Gallery joins the legions of area venues celebrating the
Cyberarts Festival with a group show of work that ranges from art on a
computer monitor to mixed-media pieces you never would have guessed had
anything to do with a computer.
Jocelyn Scheirer belongs to the first category. In ''Elements,'' she
charts the physical manifestation of certain emotions and funnels them
through an algorithm to create an evolving visual manifestation of the
psyche. It's such a cool idea that what it looks like almost doesn't matter
(so it goes with some conceptual art), but the bright, bubbling images
could be a picture of cells reproducing.
In her Iris print, ''Ghost Town Stairwell,'' Naomi Ribner layers images
and visual textures like lacy veils. Nearby hangs Adam Sherman's ''Double
Black,'' fuzzy white diamonds glowing from two black lengths of silk, a
myopic view of a grid of stars.
Carmin Karasic's Iris prints are gold-toned rivers of imagery bubbling
around a figure with closed eyes. ''Genetic Coderush'' features a DNA helix
and shadowy skeletons; ''Coderush Logic'' shows the head coming through
an engineering diagram. It's like the codes of existence through which
the flesh of ideas, art, and understanding push.
Blyth Hazen's ''Selections From the Algebra Drawings'' appeals because
it's interactive. The viewer can touch a computer monitor, and a drawing
will begin to trace itself automatically. The random element of the drawings
makes their aesthetic value chancy. Sachiko Beck's untitled digital images
burst from the paper in brilliant, edgy colors. Jennifer Hicks paints over
digital images of drawings she scanned, but you can't see them beneath
the paint. So what's the point?
The computer as artist's tool has come a long way. This show speaks
to its versatility.
