WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS Rose Art Museum Sarah Sze is known for her complicated, sprawling sculptures, accumulations of small quotidian things that add up to enigmatic and overwhelming impressions. The meaning of her works is often subsidiary to the simple, ungraspable, in-yourface complexity of each piece. In Timekeeper (2016), her multifarious accretion became smaller and more unified than in many of her previous works. Improbably, instead of building the work out to the edges of all three sculptural dimensions, she managed to add the fourth dimension.
Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile
BOSTON The Back Bay Fens Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile’s remarkable floating sculpture, placed in the Fens some 400 yards from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, celebrates the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which eventually led to independence for Ireland. The artist is known for his sculptural installations, particularly in Japan, where he regularly works with local people to construct environments in the town of Fukui, near the city of Niigata.
Gary Haven Smith
BOOTHBAY, MAINE Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens Boogie Woogie and Wiggle Room are hardly names one would expect to find for sculptures in stone, but Gary Haven Smith is hardly your ordinary stone sculptor. His approach is somewhere between a considered Zen aesthetic and playful invention. “Stone Waves,” his recent exhibition, showcased the impressive range of his freestanding work. Swept Away, perched on a pyramidal granite obelisk, looks like a twisted piece of paper.
Renwick Invitational 2016
WASHINGTON, DC Renwick Gallery The Renwick Gallery’s biennial invitationals highlight mid-career artists pushing the boundaries of craft. According to curator Nora Atkinson, the 2016 edition, “Visions and Revisions,” focused on the “degradation of society and the reinvention and rebirth of it.” Featuring the works of four American artists—Jennifer Trask, Steven Young Lee, Norwood Viviano, and Kristen Morgin—the exhibition went beyond mere ruin porn to examine the meticulous processes of each individual artist.
Roxana Alger Geffen
WASHINGTON, DC Flashpoint Gallery Though the chaotic world of parenting is all consuming when one’s children are young, it remains a risky theme for art-making. Roxana Alger Geffen boldly titled her multi-part installation Motherload with full awareness of the feminist artists who came before her and who were dismissed or pilloried for daring to valorize this elemental experience. She expands on motherhood’s—in her words—“messy box of intimacy” with broader themes addressing the construction of familial memories and notions of domestic labor.
Boaz Vaadia: Finding Equillibrium
Serenity and a pervading stillness characterized Boaz Vaadia’s recent retrospective at Grounds For Sculpture. Admirably displayed both outdoors and in two major buildings, 125 works spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career fostered a psychological centering for the viewer.
The Void Is Never Empty: A Conversation with Gaspar Acebo
Gaspar Acebo, who trained in the fields of painting and drawing, combines these mediums with other techniques and disciplines, including photography. His work is perhaps best defined by its reflection on the interaction of plane and volume, the concept of emptiness serving as an engine that generates not neutral space, but a balance of forces
Michael Gitlin: Minimalist Lyricism
While the work of American Minimalist masters such as Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd has begun to seem slightly dated, it has not lost its impetus, and the early- and middle-period sculptures of these artists continue to challenge us.
Why Did Petah Coyne’s Work Make Me Cry?
Eleven years ago, I wept openly in the middle of Petah Coynes touring survey “Above and Beneath the Skin.” Within compulsory, regulated social systems the ones that determine what options are available for a subject’s action and identification uncontrolled crying is a breach of those mores, a breakdown and demonstration of the effects of life
Brian Dettmer: Paging Through Time
How can history, memory, and cultural knowledge become the materials of sculpture? In Brian Dettmer’s hands, books that have lost their original function do just that. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference volumes represent the physicality of gathered knowledge with their moving pages, solid bindings, and words and illustrations.
