Well the Missus and I trundled downtown this past Friday to cruise the South End art galleries and say, a lot of what we saw was swell.
We started at Ars Libri, where the Robert Klein Gallery has mounted a exhibit called Distant Memories, Familiar Phantoms featuring works by Samira Alikhanzadeh, most of which were old photographs superimposed on mesh.
Representative samples:
The exhibit reminded us of work by the late David Prifti, a gifted local artist and teacher who left this world too soon.
From his Rice Polak Gallery bio:
Of his photographic assemblages Prifti said, “Through the juxtaposition of images, found objects and ephemera, I create autobiographical associations that become symbolic, conveying a sense of personal history and the passage of time. The reusing of old materials allows me to resurrect them into a new form.”
The Missus and I were lucky enough to once own this piece, which combined a photo of David’s grandmother during her ocean voyage to America with a segment of the picket fence in front of her house after she settled here.
Letting go of that haunting image was one of the toughest decisions we made in our Great Deaccession of 2014, but that’s a tale for another time.
Back in the South End, we next dropped by the Boston Sculptors Gallery, which paid tribute to recently deceased local artist David A. Lang in this delightfully eccentric Flights of Fancy exhibit.
The Boston Sculptors Gallery presents Flights of Fancy, an exhibition of sculpture by the late artist David A. Lang. The show includes Lang’s signature kinetic pieces which, when set off by motion detectors, come to life when closely inspected by viewers. Flights of Fancy explores the whimsical—yet serious— nature of an artist who preferred to describe his efforts as “accidentally profound.”
But the main event at the gallery is Jessica Straus’s TransAtlantic.
Straus’ parents met as a result of her American father’s participation as a soldier in the Normandy invasion and subsequent march into Paris, where he met the artist’s mother, a French student.
For the installation at Boston Sculptors Gallery, the walls and floor will be clad in a room-sized World War II era map. A fleet of airplanes and an ocean liner criss-cross the Atlantic Ocean carrying correspondence between the artist’s American and French families.
The big picture (photos courtesy of the artist).
Fun with maps ‘n’ mail.
Both exhibits are totally immersive, and both run through January 27th.
Totally worth a trundle to the South End.
Campaign Outsider 