It must be time for the 2007 Annual Exhibition at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.
Since 1989 the Lincoln museum has showcased New England artists pushing the creative envelope by expressing deeply personal visions in unexpected ways.
Created for the DeCordova's Window Gallery, Samantha Fields' "Curtain Mother" - "the mother of all curtains" - prepares visitors for the show by subverting conventional ideas about how art should look.
For the DeCordova's 18th annual exhibit, curator Nick Capasso, Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo and former curatorial fellow Lisa Sutcliffe have brought together 10 distinctive artists from five New England states who take widely varied approaches to their work.
Ria Brodell created the imaginary world of Distant Lands where Clumps wage war against Sodmonsters. Robert Taplin transmutes the popular jester Punch into a fornicating public nuisance. And Sandra Allen has drawn a 37-1/2-foot-tall tree, considerably larger than the actual model.
They tell stories, explore seedy neighborhoods and make art from global warming using whatever materials appeal to them. This show features drawings, photography, sculptures, installations and printmaking.
The show runs through Aug. 12.
Vincent Van Gogh might have favored oil paints but Jeff "Jeffu" Warmouth uses wrinkly potatoes to create a faux Soviet-style space race featuring tinfoil-wrapped Spudniks hot off his creative Frialator.
So no one should be surprised to see Anne Lilly's mesmerizing stainless steel kinetic sculptures paying whirring tribute to Emily Dickinson or Nathalie Miebach's other-worldly baskets woven according to three-dimensional interpretations of climactic data.
Rather than just hang on walls, their art takes over the stairways, covers walls and fills spacious galleries in ways that challenge conventional notions of how art is made and presented.
Established in 1989 as the "Artists/Visions" series, the exhibit initially showcased "emerging, mid-career" artists from six New England states. While the criteria remains flexible, organizers say they're looking for "the best, most innovative and gifted artists working in the region."
Lafo took part in the first 1989 show and Capasso joined the museum a year later. "I think because we've been doing it for 18 years, the exhibit does provide an annual barometer, a sort of window into the contemporary art scene," said Capasso. "We're not trying to make a final pronouncement. In the end, it reflects the interests and tastes of the curators."
While the artists can work in any medium, they must live in New England and not have been in previous annual shows.
Capasso said the three curators spent a day last November "going at it hammer and tongs" to select 10 exhibitors from about 35 artists whose works were under consideration. After proposing several artists, each curator had to convince the others the work deserved to be in the show.
"We try to achieve a certain balance," he said. "There's no over-arching theme except quality and diversity."
While the curators don't try to organize the exhibition thematically, Capasso said, "The fun part is when themes start to emerge on their own.
"I think one of the themes that emerged this year is a lot of artists are interested in their own kind of narratives," he said.
In her engaging "Distant Lands" installation Brodell has imagined, painted and fashioned creatures whose senseless conflicts seem to mirror our own.
Resembling compost heaps mixed with rug scraps, Clumps and Sodmonsters are locked in pointless war that's pulled in a grinning blue whale, Guineasaurs and Bird Men with beaks and human faces. Brodell paints finely detailed battle scenes and constructs fuzzy Wormbunnies that resemble the Cookie Monster on a bad hair day.
Brodell's fantasy offers disturbing parallels to the world we see on the evening news. While her creatures are playfully drawn, she has placed them in an ominous world of war and genetically mutated species where peace seems a distant dream.
Taplin twists an old story by appropriating the clownish figure of Punch and miniaturizing him in urethane resin sculptures about the size of a lawn ornament. Subverting his traditional role in commedia dell'arte, Taplin inserts Punch into a series of awkward situations such as mounting the Contessa, urinating in a vase and getting "arrested at the border."
Part Everyman, part outsider, Taplin's Punch mirrors our own ambivalence about our divided nature. "In bringing Punch into our own era," Taplin writes, "I find he appears to be entirely at home."
In unsettling photos, Elke Morris transforms seedy neighborhoods into toy ghost towns. She photographs tired neighborhoods in Lewiston, Maine, and then uses Photoshop to blur her backgrounds while highlighting rundown two- and three-deckers.
In 30-by-40-inch prints, Morris inverts Norman Rockwell's picturesque America by leaving out the familiar characters to focus on scraggly yards, boats on blocks, empty clotheslines and backyard grills. We don't want to look but it's hard to turn away.
With his Salvador Dali moustache, Warmouth has created "Spudnik," a singular multimedia potpourri that combines a potato fetish, surrealism, schlock movies and very weird humor.
An art teacher at Fitchburg State College, he has reinvented the Cold War space race of the 1960s through a series of purposefully corny documentaries, photos and exhibits focused on "Spudnik," a tinfoil-wrapped potato impersonating a Soviet-style satellite.
When cosmonaut Alexandra Peelzov achieves liftoff from "three pounds of soaked lima beans" or Spudnik crashes because "engineers neglected to poke holes in the foil to prevent steam buildup," visitors can either laugh, shake their heads or marvel at Warmouth's warped recasting of recent history.
While "Spudnik" evokes chuckles and groans, Warmouth's spacey installation explores serious questions about how government-driven media coverage shaped public perception of the Space Race.
Capasso said the broadening use of non-traditional materials "reflects what's going on in the contemporary art scene."
While Rodin sculpted marble, Capasso observed Fields effectively used vinyl siding, wallpaper and Afghan blankets in her other work, "Wallpapered Space II."
"Before the 1960s, there were strict hierarchies of materials. Painters used oils on canvas. Sculptors used marble or bronze," said Capasso. "But today, artists use any materials they want to express whatever they want. It's hard when a particular material says 'I am art.' Every material has something to say."
He might have been describing Miebach and Lilly who employ utterly different kinds of materials to make art with nothing in common but a shared ingenuity and impact.
A German native now living in Brookline, Miebach brings together two utterly unlikely components - reeds used to make baskets and weather data.
She was simultaneously taking courses in basket weaving and astronomy when she noticed outer space was always represented two-dimensionally in sky charts. So Miebach set out to weave her own basket-like vessels by basing their designs on scientific measurements of tides, the ozone layer and migratory patterns of birds.
Warped and wondrous, Miebach's woven baskets are sculpted expressions of the natural world.
Based in Allston, Lilly builds stainless steel kinetic sculptures composed of gears, disks, cylinders and rods that look both futuristic and elemental. They are the only works on display which visitors are urged to "gently" touch.
When set in motion, the gears rotate and the rods undulate in unpredictable patterns. Sometimes they sway like wheat, open like flowers or wave like a jellyfish wiggling polished tentacles.
One piece called "Benedictine Harp" has four sail-like grills that, when nudged, whirl around and through each other like solar panels on a satellite.
Taking its name from a Dickinson poem, the piece called "There's a certain slant of light" spins its slender rods as marking her poem's meter. Another piece called "Aristotle" is so ingeniously constructed its rods quicken, slow down and quicken again when pushed.
Describing her sculptures in the exhibit's Process Gallery, which uses audio recordings and videos to show how artists work, Lilly explained: "I'm trying to empty out the sculpture.
"I work with stuff but I'm pointing to stuff that's not there. I'm trying to make it more minimal," she said. "This is fundamentally trying to say something about space and material."
zhed: THE ESSENTIALS:
The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln, is open Tuesday through Sunday, and on selected Monday holidays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Admission is $9 for adults, $6 for seniors, students and youths age 6 through 12. Children under age 5, Lincoln residents and active-duty military personnel are admitted free.
The Sculpture Park is open year-round during daylight hours.
Artists in the current show will discuss their work in Gallery Talks on selected Saturdays at 3 p.m. that are free with admission:
June 2: Sarah Amos
June 16: Jeff Warmouth
June 23: Elke Morris
June 30: Ria Brodell
The museum is also offering its Eye Wonder Family Program, from 1-3 on selected Sundays, in which selected artists will discuss new ways of looking at art through family-friendly guided tours and hands-on activities. The following artists will host:
Today, May 20: Samantha Fields
June 24: Anne Lilly
July 22: Jeff Warmouth
Aug. 12: Ria Brodell
Free guided public tours of the museum's main galleries take place every Thursday at 1 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Free tours of the Sculpture Park are given on Saturday and Sunday at 1 p.m. through October.
For further information, call 781-259-8355 or visit the museum Web site at www.decordova.org.
