Globe 2005

ART REVIEW
Variety blooms at DeCordova Annual
By Christine Temin, Globe Staff | May 27, 2005

LINCOLN -- Ah, the DeCordova Annual. At the end of a long season of Boston-area shows with heavy themes or theories, along comes the Annual, as reliable as the sturdiest of perennials pushing their way up through the ground each spring.

As always, the primary thing the artists share is a current New England address. While the Annual doesn't include locals who are already internationally celebrated and don't need the boost, neither do its curators -- Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Nick Capasso, George Fifield, and Alexandra Novina -- make a point of seeking out emerging talent. They're just on the hunt for good art.

And like curators and critics, viewers will naturally pick favorites. Among this year's crop of 10 artists, mine are Milan Klic and Nadya Volicer. Klic's bamboo and thread fairy-tale vehicles are on wheels that can never move because they're sagging or tilted. The effect is wistful. They're nonsense machines in the tradition of Rube Goldberg. Set against white walls, they look like drawings in space, ghosts of vehicles.

If the DeCordova gave out a Most Popular Award, Volicer would probably get it for turning a bland corridor into a giant wave of wood. Volicer salvaged thousands of fragments of lumber in a dizzying number of colors and shapes. On the floor of the wave, they're pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, relatively flat, so you can walk on them. The wall becomes more three-dimensional as it ascends to the right, eventually forming a jagged canopy overhead, the pieces barely clinging to one another before the wall crashes in a sweeping leftward plunge that threatens to swallow you. Volicer has stunningly transformed the hallway, in the process inadvertently creating what is surely the greatest-ever entrance to a museum cafe.

In shows that start with a theme defined by curators who then try to find art to fit it, the results can be contrived. Here the curators present each artist's work independently -- and ironically, that leaves the viewer freer to discover serendipitous connections.

Volicer and Mark Wethli, for example, both make huge, site-specific pieces that transform two of the museum's major spaces. Klic and Sally Moore concoct fragile fantasies: about vehicles, in his case; architecture, in hers. Jean Blackburn, too, starts with the mundane -- household furnishings -- and reinterprets it in unsettling ways. Laurie Sloan and Nao Tomii create wiggly biomorphic forms. Lalla A. Essaydi, Barbara Takenaga, and Michael Lewy make art that is obsessive in one way or another.

Wethli's mural ''Elevator" serves as the show's introduction: A 41-foot vertical painted on the wall facing the museum's dramatic staircase, it boasts big, buoyant circles in happy hues that look as if they'd just been blown from a child's bubble pipe.
Tomii, a young Japanese artist living in Boston, is part of his generation's rebellion against the traditional quiet elegance of Japanese art, preferring plastic, polka dots, and a kind of latter-day Pop Art approach. He uses rubber, resin, and other commercial materials to create a world of mutant animals clinging to the wall and weird plants sprouting from flower pots. Nature has always been the prime player in Japanese art; Tomii is updating it.

Sloan shares more with the Terry Winters school of biomorphic art, her cut paper and screen-print works filled with affable blobs that occasionally resemble fish, flocks of birds, or drops of tears or blood depending on the color. Her shapes are all hyperactive, on overdrive: No slackers need apply.

Lewy's works are sweet -- not an adjective often applied to art made with Microsoft PowerPoint software. Crisp ink-jet prints measure Lewy's happiness, enthusiasm, desire, and fulfillment, all expressed through faux-scientific graphs made of bars, colors, and lines.

Blackburn's fractured furnishings are the most difficult works to link to the rest of the show. She makes a sculpture of silver spoons, cut so they intersect to make a chain that curves directly out from the wall, starting with the largest ladle and ending with the tiniest salt spoon. The result is something of an engineering feat, but also a gesture of hospitality.

Essaydi, a Muslim woman originally from Morocco, is the show's most political artist. Her photographs of women writing calligraphy and covered and defined by it -- faces, robes, and all -- are gorgeous. More important, they're potent, multifaceted symbols. In the culture from which Essaydi comes, calligraphy is the purview of men. Here it both belongs to women and ensnares them in webs of words.

Essaydi's works are obviously labor-intensive. So are Takenaga's -- multicolored galaxies of twinkling circles and dots swirling through space. By varying the tone and the size of the circles, she can create a sense of great depth. There is an echo of the psychedelic in her work: It's easy to imagine it in poster form, hanging on walls of dorm rooms a few decades ago.

Moore's constructions, suspended in midair, are made of pins, needles, matches, thorns, wire, puffs of polyester that read as clouds, and bits of wood that form staircases and ladders leading nowhere. Each has a visual tale to tell. ''Persephone," for instance, is the story of the classical goddess of the underworld, deftly told through landscape: a tiny green oasis aboveground, and the trailing roots of a tree underneath.

Moore's work is about connections -- both made and missed. In her largest piece, ''Island Communication," irregular little shapes project from the wall, all joined by wires suggesting in an admirably unsentimental way that no matter how distant islands -- or people -- are from one another, there are ways to converse if the desire is there.