Forty-one-year-old, Boston-based sculptor Tory Fair likes to think of herself as a “late bloomer,” and the evolution of her artistic career is allied with her varied experiences as an athlete, environmentalist, traveler, and spiritualist dreamer.1 For her second solo show at South Boston’s LaMontagne gallery in spring 2010, Fair created three life-sized, self-portrait figures designed
Robert Taplin: Recent Narratives
Among last season’s most haunting exhibitions, Robert Taplin’s “Everything Imagined Is Real (After Dante)” (2007–09) featured nine eerie “tableaux” enacted by small, life-like figures contained in massive wooden “shrines.” Like miniature dioramas with unstable perspectives, the equivocal “stages” were lit in various ways, their characters agile, oddly solid, simplified little ghosts, usually devoid of color
Doug and Mike Starn: Reveling in Chaos
Stately and symmetrical, the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens into rigorously ordered spaces that guide viewers systematically along a rectilinear path. But now, and through the end of October, those visitors who make their way to the elevator that leads to the Iris and B.
Reiterating Allan Kaprow’s Yard
For Allan Kaprow, prodigious artist, theorist, and inventor of Happenings in the late ’50s, art and life were not separate. He wanted art to reflect life directly. While his Happenings did not always rise to the level of his intentions, when they did, the experience could prove exhilarating.
Michael Aurbach: Secrecy, the Promethean Weapon
Chained to an icy crag by Zeus and tormented by an eagle, Prometheus had one weapon, a secret: he knew who would bear the son fated to dethrone the father of the gods. Secrets, the myth tells us, give power to their bearers, however vulnerable they might seem.
Revolutionizing History: A Conversation with Olivia Robinson, Josh MacPhee, and Dara Greenwald
Artists Olivia Robinson, Josh MacPhee, and Dara Greenwald make the invisible visible, from daily routines to entire cultural moments. Passing through the streets of Troy, New York, the trio felt a mounting sense of dismay at the changing cityscape and the loss of visible history.
Maria Artemis: Mining Materials
The best ideas often come when you least expect them. For a year, Maria Artemis worked on her show for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Armed with a Working Artists Program award from the Charles Loridans Foundation, which provided her with financial support and a paid studio assistant for one year, the Atlanta-based
Willard Boepple: Disembodiment and Sensuality
The sculptures of Willard Boepple are a riposte to Plato. At the very least, they engage in a game of cat and mouse with the Platonic concept of archetypes. Created in series, Boepple’s forms are utilitarian, commonplace, timeless things like ladders, shelves, rooms, railings, sawhorses, and benches.
Art and Nature: Spain’s Landscape Art Initiative in Huesca
Located in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains, Huesca is one of the most beautiful and least populated provinces in Spain. Half of its territory consists of mountainous natural parks that protect an array of endangered species, and many of its valleys are guarded by Romanesque-style churches.
The Art of Activism: A Conversation with Barbara Hashimoto
Barbara Hashimoto’s recent work resides at the intersection of sculpture, consumer culture, and environmental concerns. She collects and shreds junk mail to build large-scale naturalistic forms that ironically resemble the earth itself. Transitory and site-specific, these pieces expose the excessive use, and even abuse, of natural resources that enables the seemingly limitless supply of printed
